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Activation Checkpointing for Llama3 branch #773

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@ademeure ademeure commented Oct 2, 2024

This keeps residual3 for all layers, and then up to N layers for everything else, with relatively little complexity...

This means if you set "-ac 16", it will only recompute 50% of activations with a 32 layer model, and 75% of activations with a 64 layer model. The value must be a multiple of the number of layers in the model. It can be combined with "-r 1" and "-r 2", e.g. "-ac 16 -r 2" is faster than "-ac 1 -r 0" and lower memory than "-ac 16 -r 0".

This is not the absolute minimum memory strategy: with e.g. "-ac 4", we still store every residual3, even though we could only store 1 in 4, but that would be more complicated because it requires also temporarily storing an extra 3 or 4 residuals somewhere (the ones that are being recomputed). More importantly, this allows us to not recompute one of the 2 big matmuls, so it's a very attractive performance vs memory trade-off.

However, for Llama3 405B with a context length of 128K, that's 4GiB per layer, or 504GiB for all layers, which obviously doesn't fit on a single GPU, not even on a GH200... so we will probably need that extra complexity sooner rather than later.

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