Skip to content

Activation Usage of Dualpipe #23

@zyucccc

Description

@zyucccc

Hi! I’d like to clarify a couple of things about DualPipe's memory and bubble formula:

Activation Usage – Why “+1”?
In 1F1B, the peak activation memory is roughly PP.
But for DualPipe, it’s said to be PP + 1.
Is the "+1" simply because middle ranks process PP + 1 microbatches at peak time?
Or is it due to how the overlapping of forward and backward computation works?
For example, during the overlap_forward_backward phase, we first accumulate a forward activation (1 MB), and then free the corresponding backward activation. So in terms of memory, can we think of overlap_fwd_bwd as: Accumulate 1 MB activation then free 1MB?

Image

And also i wonder to understand, in the bubble formula for DualPipe, I noticed it includes a −3W term (where W is weight gradient computation).
Image

From my understanding, if we're replacing idle time with weight computation, shouldn't it be more like: (PP/2 - 1) * (Fwd + Input - Weight) ? (Input & Weight for Bwd_Input, Bwd_Weight)

Thanks a lot for any clarification!

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions