Flash Attention Optimization Problem ===================================== Problem Setting --------------- Design and optimize high-performance Triton kernels for Flash Attention computation on GPU. This problem focuses on implementing efficient attention kernels with causal masking support using Triton's JIT compilation system. The challenge involves optimizing: - **Attention computation**: Efficient computation of scaled dot-product attention - **Causal masking**: Handling causal attention masks efficiently - **Memory access patterns**: Efficient loading and storing of Q, K, V tensors - **Numerical stability**: Handling softmax operations with proper numerical stability using streaming softmax - **Block tiling**: Optimal block sizes for GPU execution across different sequence lengths - **Performance benchmarking**: Achieving speedup over baseline PyTorch implementations Target ------ - **Primary**: Maximize geometric mean speedup over baseline (higher is better) - **Secondary**: Ensure correctness across diverse sequence lengths and attention heads - **Tertiary**: Minimize kernel launch overhead and memory usage API Specification ----------------- Implement a `Solution` class that returns a Triton kernel implementation: ```python class Solution: def solve(self, spec_path: str = None) -> dict: """ Returns a dict with either: - {"code": "python_code_string"} - {"program_path": "path/to/kernel.py"} """ # Your implementation pass ``` Your kernel implementation must provide: ```python import torch import triton import triton.language as tl def flash_attn(Q: torch.Tensor, K: torch.Tensor, V: torch.Tensor, causal: bool = True) -> torch.Tensor: """ Flash attention computation with optional causal masking. Args: Q: Input tensor of shape (Z, H, M, Dq) - query tensor (float16) K: Input tensor of shape (Z, H, N, Dq) - key tensor (float16) V: Input tensor of shape (Z, H, N, Dv) - value tensor (float16) causal: Whether to apply causal masking (default True) Returns: Output tensor of shape (Z, H, M, Dv) - attention output (float16) """ # Your implementation pass ``` Input Specifications -------------------- - **Q**: Query tensor of shape `(Z, H, M, Dq)` where: - `Z`: Batch size (typically 1) - `H`: Number of attention heads (typically 8) - `M`: Query sequence length (tested with 512, 1024, 2048) - `Dq`: Query/key feature dimension (typically 64) - **K**: Key tensor of shape `(Z, H, N, Dq)` where `N` matches `M` for flash attention - **V**: Value tensor of shape `(Z, H, N, Dv)` where: - `Dv`: Value feature dimension (typically 64) - All inputs are `torch.float16` and on CUDA device - `causal`: Boolean flag for causal masking (default True) Output Specifications -------------------- - Output tensor of shape `(Z, H, M, Dv)` matching the query batch/head dimensions - Output dtype: `torch.float16` - Output device: Same as input (CUDA) Correctness Requirements ------------------------- - Numerical correctness verified against PyTorch baseline implementation - Relative tolerance: 1e-2, Absolute tolerance: 5e-3 - All test cases must pass for any score above 0 - Causal masking must be correctly implemented when `causal=True` Scoring (0-100) --------------- Performance is measured against GPU baseline implementations: ``` geometric_mean_gpu_time = geometric_mean(gpu_baseline_times) geometric_mean_answer_time = geometric_mean(answer_times) # Linear interpolation: 0 points = 1x GPU baseline, 100 points = 10x GPU baseline target_time_0 = geometric_mean_gpu_time # 0 points (1x GPU baseline) target_time_100 = geometric_mean_gpu_time / 10.0 # 100 points (10x speedup over GPU) score = 100 * (target_time_0 - geometric_mean_answer_time) / (target_time_0 - target_time_100) ``` - 0 points = 1x GPU baseline performance - 100 points = 10x speedup over GPU baseline - Score is linearly interpolated between these two points Note: Correctness is verified against GPU baseline, and scoring spans from 1x GPU baseline (0 points) to 10x GPU baseline (100 points). Evaluation Details ------------------ - Test cases: M = 512, 1024, 2048 (with N = M) - Warmup phase: 10 iterations to stabilize GPU clocks and caches - Random seed: Fixed seed (0) for reproducible data generation - Strict correctness: Any test failure results in score of 0 Additional Notes ---------------- - The benchmark uses float32 for PyTorch baseline (for numerical stability) but float16 for answer evaluation - Streaming softmax techniques are recommended for numerical stability - Consider using block pointers (`tl.make_block_ptr`) for efficient memory access - Causal masking requires careful attention to the masking pattern (lower triangular for causal attention)