This PR improves the FP8 performance of linear layers, which had been lacking before (#4118 (comment) and #4118 (comment)).
We noticed that CUBLASLt can find a better algorithm if the first dimension of the matrix is greater than 16. So this PR enlarges matrices appropriately during quantization. This improves FP8 performance and removes the performance regression vs. FP16, in many cases exceeding FP16 performance.
Here are benchmarks on llama3 70b (ITL numbers for 1000 input and 50 output tokens at fixed qps and at TP 4), all FP8 measurements are for dynamic quantization:
qps = 1: 24 ms (FP8, this PR), 32 ms (FP8, previous main), 26 ms (FP16)
qps = 2: 26 ms (FP8, this PR), 34ms (FP8, previous main), 28 ms (FP16)
qps = 4: 33 ms (FP8, this PR), 44 ms (FP8, previous main), 36 ms (FP16)
qps = 6: 46 ms (FP8, this PR), 56 ms (FP8, previous main), 54 ms (FP16)
qps = 8: 85 ms (FP8, this PR), 85 ms (FP8, previous main), 138 ms (FP16)
This PR is the first step towards fixing https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/3208
It implements dynamic per-tensor scaling (see https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/4118), so users do not need to compute activation scales on a calibration dataset and they also don't need to convert their model checkpoints. It is enough to specify the `quantization="fp8"` argument. You can try out the PR like this:
```python
from vllm import LLM, SamplingParams
prompts = [
"Hello, my name is",
"The president of the United States is",
"The capital of France is",
"The future of AI is",
]
sampling_params = SamplingParams(temperature=0.8, top_p=0.95)
llm = LLM(model="mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1", tensor_parallel_size=2, quantization="fp8")
outputs = llm.generate(prompts, sampling_params)
# Print the outputs.
for output in outputs:
prompt = output.prompt
generated_text = output.outputs[0].text
print(f"Prompt: {prompt!r}, Generated text: {generated_text!r}")
```
**Performance**: For this PR, the focus is on making the code clean (while still trying to get reasonable performance), there is a bunch of optimizations that we will submit as a follow up PR that significantly improve the performance (similar to the numbers in https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/3954). With this PR, the results are as follows:
<img width="725" alt="Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 1 31 50 PM" src="https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/assets/113316/d8fe1118-07a0-4d4e-8530-37a77d465a03">
**Accuracy**: The accuracy with this PR on MMLU on `mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-v0.1` is as follows:
```
| Groups |Version|Filter|n-shot|Metric|Value | |Stderr|
|------------------|-------|------|-----:|------|-----:|---|-----:|
|mmlu |N/A |none | 0|acc |0.7018|± |0.0036|
| - humanities |N/A |none | 5|acc |0.6472|± |0.0065|
| - other |N/A |none | 5|acc |0.7673|± |0.0072|
| - social_sciences|N/A |none | 5|acc |0.8099|± |0.0070|
| - stem |N/A |none | 5|acc |0.6131|± |0.0083|
```
this compares favorably with the fp16 results which are
```
| Groups |Version|Filter|n-shot|Metric|Value | |Stderr|
|------------------|-------|------|-----:|------|-----:|---|-----:|
|mmlu |N/A |none | 0|acc |0.7020|± |0.1313|
| - humanities |N/A |none | 5|acc |0.6425|± |0.1349|
| - other |N/A |none | 5|acc |0.7744|± |0.1038|
| - social_sciences|N/A |none | 5|acc |0.8131|± |0.0695|
| - stem |N/A |none | 5|acc |0.6108|± |0.1383|
```
Happy hacking!
