CUDA: fix --split-mode row race condition #9413
Merged
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Fixes #8801 (comment) .
The problem is that
--split-mode row
uses multiple CUDA streams to overlap data transfer with computation but on CUDA GPUs that are Volta or newer each of these streams allocates a temporary buffer for the stream-k fixup. And because it's not safe to allocate temporary buffers with multiple CUDA streams in parallel this leads to a race condition. However, because both stream-k decomposition and--split-mode row
mitigates tail effects it's fine to just not use stream-k if multiple parallel CUDA streams are in use; the performance difference with 3x RTX 4090 is ~1%.Long-term it may make sense to think about how we can safely handle multiple parallel CUDA streams. I think a good approach would be to move the parallelism from something CUDA-specific to something at the level of GGML compute graphs. That would also enable the reuse of the code for other backends.