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feat: TQ3 compressed ring all-reduce for TP bandwidth reduction#181

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influenist:feature/tq3-compressed-allreduce
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feat: TQ3 compressed ring all-reduce for TP bandwidth reduction#181
influenist wants to merge 1 commit intoturboderp-org:masterfrom
influenist:feature/tq3-compressed-allreduce

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Summary

Adds optional TQ3 compression to the Native TP backend's ring all-reduce, reducing inter-GPU data transfer by ~6.4x (fp16 → 2.5 bits/value).

Independent of PR #180 — this is a communication optimization, not a quantization format.

How it works

Each ring iteration:

  1. Compress: fp16 → TQ3 (10 bytes per 32 values) before writing to shared memory
  2. Decompress+accumulate: fused read+decode+add from predecessor's slot
  3. Broadcast: forward accumulated result (uncompressed)

When it helps

Interconnect Bandwidth TQ3 benefit
PCIe Gen4 x16 32 GB/s Significant — ~6x less data
InfiniBand HDR 25 GB/s Large — network is bottleneck
Ethernet 100G 12.5 GB/s Essential
NVLink (A100+) 600+ GB/s Minimal — compute dominates

Files (7 files, +694 lines)

  • `parallel/tq3_compress.cuh` — thread-level compress/decompress/decompress+add primitives
  • `parallel/tq3_all_reduce.cu/.cuh` — compressed ring kernel using existing ParallelContext
  • `bindings.cpp` — `ext.tq3_all_reduce()` binding
  • `model_tp_backend.py` — `TPBackendNative.tq3_compress` opt-in flag
  • `tests/test_tq3_allreduce.py` — 7 simulation tests (no multi-GPU needed)
  • `tests/bench_tq3_allreduce.py` — bandwidth break-even analysis

Opt-in

backend.tq3_compress = True  # Enable compressed communication

Test plan

  • `pytest tests/test_tq3_allreduce.py -v` — compression quality simulation
  • `python tests/bench_tq3_allreduce.py` — break-even bandwidth analysis
  • Multi-GPU integration test (2+ GPUs)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Adds compressed communication to the Native TP backend's ring
all-reduce, reducing inter-GPU data transfer by ~6.4x.

Algorithm:
1. Each rank compresses local fp16 data to TQ3 (10 bytes per 32 values)
2. Writes compressed data to shared memory ring buffer
3. Ring reduce: decompress from predecessor + accumulate locally
4. Ring broadcast: forward accumulated result
5. Result written back in-place

New files:
- tq3_compress.cuh: Thread-level TQ3 compress/decompress/decompress+add
- tq3_all_reduce.cu: Standalone compressed ring kernel using ParallelContext
- tq3_all_reduce.cuh: Header declarations

Integration:
- TPBackendNative.tq3_compress flag (opt-in)
- ext.tq3_all_reduce() binding

Impact: PCIe setups (32 GB/s) and multi-machine (InfiniBand) see
significant throughput improvement. NVLink setups see minimal change
since interconnect is rarely the bottleneck.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Author

Closing — CUDA kernels were never compiled or tested on real hardware. Will revisit after the KV cache PR (#182) is reviewed.

@influenist influenist closed this Apr 1, 2026
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