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Sequence Parallelism: Long Sequence Training from System Perspective (2021) (arxiv.org)
2 points by jxmorris12 on Aug 26, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: This splits the sequence into chunks, one per GPU, and passes them around a ring so attention sees everything, with none holding it all. On 64 GPUs it trained sequences 3 times longer than the usual approach of splitting a layer's math across GPUs.

Abstract · Sequence Parallelism: Long Sequence Training from System Perspective

Transformer achieves promising results on various tasks. However, self-attention suffers from quadratic memory requirements with respect to the sequence length. Existing work focuses on reducing time and space complexity from an algorithm perspective. In this work, we propose sequence parallelism, a memory-efficient parallelism method to help us break input sequence length limitation and train with longer sequences on GPUs efficiently. Our approach is compatible with most existing parallelisms (e.g. data parallelism, pipeline parallelism and tensor parallelism), which means our sequence parallelism makes 4D parallelism possible. More importantly, we no longer require a single device to hold the whole sequence. That is, with sparse attention, our sequence parallelism enables us to train transformer with infinite long sequence. Specifically, we split the input sequence into multiple chunks and feed each chunk into its corresponding device (i.e. GPU). To compute the attention output, we integrated ring-style communication with self-attention calculation and proposed Ring Self-Attention (RSA). Experiments show that sequence parallelism performs well when scaling with batch size and sequence length. Compared with tensor parallelism, our approach achieved $13.7\times$ and $3.0\times$ maximum batch size and sequence length respectively when scaling up to 64 NVIDIA P100 GPUs. With sparse attention, sequence can handle sequence with over 114K tokens, which is over $27\times$ longer than existing sparse attention works holding the whole sequence on a single device.

Shenggui Li, Fuzhao Xue, Chaitanya Baranwal, Yongbin Li, Yang You
arXiv:2105.13120 · cs.LG, cs.DC · submitted May 26, 2021 · updated May 21, 2022
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