# 2D Tensor Parallelism Author: Zhengda Bian, Yongbin Li **Prerequisite** - [Define Your Configuration](../basics/define_your_config.md) - [Configure Parallelization](../basics/configure_parallelization.md) - [1D Tensor Parallelism](./1D_tensor_parallel.md) **Example Code** - [ColossalAI-Examples - 2D Tensor Parallelism](https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI-Examples/blob/main/features/tensor_parallel/README.md) **Related Paper** - [An Efficient 2D Method for Training Super-Large Deep Learning Models](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.05343.pdf) ## Introduction 1D tensor parallelism does not partition activations, which can also consume a great amount of memory in terms of large-scale models. To evenly distribute the computation and memory load, [an efficient 2D tensor parallelism algorithm](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.05343.pdf) was introduced based on SUMMA (Scalable Universal Matrix Multiplication Algorithm). Let's still take a linear layer $Y = XA$ as an example. Given $P=q\times q$ processors (necessary condition), e.g. $q=2$, we split both the input $X$ and weight $A$ into $$ \left[\begin{matrix} X_{00} & X_{01} \\ X_{10} & X_{11} \end{matrix} \right] \text{~and~} \left[\begin{matrix} A_{00} & A_{01} \\ A_{10} & A_{11} \end{matrix} \right]. $$ The calculation includes $q$ steps. When $t=1$, $X_{i0}$ is broadcasted in its row, and $A_{0j}$ is broadcasted in its column. So, we have $$ \left[\begin{matrix} X_{00},A_{00} & X_{00},A_{01} \\ X_{10},A_{00} & X_{10},A_{01} \end{matrix} \right]. $$ Then we multiply $X_{i0}$ and $A_{0j}$ on each processor $(i, j)$ as $$ \left[\begin{matrix} X_{00}A_{00} & X_{00}A_{01} \\ X_{10}A_{00} & X_{10}A_{01} \end{matrix} \right] (1). $$ Similarly, when $t=2$, $X_{i1}$ is broadcasted in its row, $A_{1j}$ is broadcasted in its column, and we multiply them as $$ \left[\begin{matrix} X_{01}A_{10} & X_{01}A_{11} \\ X_{11}A_{10} & X_{11}A_{11} \end{matrix} \right] (2). $$ By adding $(1)$ and $(2)$ up, we have $$ Y = XA = \left[\begin{matrix} X_{00}A_{00}+X_{01}A_{10} & X_{00}A_{01}+X_{01}A_{11} \\ X_{10}A_{00}+X_{11}A_{10} & X_{10}A_{01}+X_{11}A_{11} \end{matrix} \right]. $$ ## Efficiency Given $P=q\times q$ processors, we present the theoretical computation and memory cost, as well as the communication cost based on the ring algorithm in both the forward and backward pass of 2D tensor parallelism. | Computation | Memory (parameters) | Memory (activations) | Communication (bandwidth) | Communication (latency) | | :-: | :-: | :-: | :-: | :-: | | $O(1/q^2)$ | $O(1/q^2)$ | $O(1/q^2)$ | $O(6(q-1)/q)$ | $O(6(q-1))$ | ## Usage Currently the newest version of ColossalAI doesn't support 2D tensor parallelism, but this feature will be integrated into `Shardformer` in future releases. For more details about ideas and usages of `Shardformer`, please refer to [Shardformer Doc](./shardformer.md). For users of older version of ColossalAI, please refer to [ColossalAI-Examples - 2D Tensor Parallelism](https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI-Examples/blob/main/features/tensor_parallel/README.md).