Papers › DISTFLASHATTN: Distributed Memory-efficient Attention for Long-context LLMs Training
DISTFLASHATTN: Distributed Memory-efficient Attention for Long-context LLMs Training
Dacheng Li, Rulin Shao, Anze Xie, Eric P. Xing, Xuezhe Ma, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Hao Zhang
FlashAttention (Dao, 2023) effectively reduces the quadratic peak memory usage to linear in training transformer-based large language models (LLMs) on a single GPU. In this paper, we introduce DISTFLASHATTN, a distributed memory-efficient attention mechanism optimized for long-context LLMs training. We propose three key techniques: token-level workload balancing, overlapping key-value communication, and a rematerialization-aware gradient checkpointing algorithm. We evaluate DISTFLASHATTN on Llama-7B and variants with sequence lengths from 32K to 512K. DISTFLASHATTN achieves 8x longer sequences, 4.45 - 5.64x speedup compared to Ring Self-Attention, 2 - 8x longer sequences, 1.24 - 2.01x speedup compared to Megatron-LM with FlashAttention. It achieves 1.67x and 1.26 - 1.88x speedup compared to recent Ring Attention and DeepSpeed-Ulysses. Code is available at https://github.com/RulinShao/LightSeq.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections