Dive into FlashAttention-3
The rise of large language models has made the “attention” mechanism a cornerstone of modern AI. But attention is computationally and memory-intensive, often becoming a bottleneck. Enter FlashAttention, a groundbreaking algorithm designed to accelerate this crucial step. While newer variants (e.g., FlashAttention-4 targeting Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture) are appearing, FlashAttention-3 on the Hopper (H100) platform represents an important step in GPU‑aware attention kernels. This post dissects the combination of algorithmic and hardware‑aware techniques reported by the authors (fused kernels, tiling, and hardware-assisted data movement). ...