Paper Proposes Affinity-Aware Sharding to Improve Delayed Tensor Parallelism
A new arXiv preprint examines Delayed Tensor Parallelism (DTP), a scheme that avoids the blocking all-reduce step in tensor-parallel Transformer inference by letting each device immediately add its partial output to the residual stream and broadcast it. The authors introduce affinity-aware sharding as a way to organize this communication and computation across devices. The work targets more efficient distributed inference for large Transformer models.