Quantization of GLM-130B

Usage

Please note that SwissArmyTransformer>=0.2.11 is required for quantization

Set CHECKPOINT_PATH in configs/model_glm_130b_{int4/int8}.sh to your local checkpoint folder. The model will be first initialized from the FP16 checkpoint on the CPU memory, then dynamically quantized and transferred to the GPU memory. So please make sure you have enough CPU memory (>260GB) to store the FP16 model weights.

You need to pay attention to the tensor parallel dimension of the model checkpoint, we only provide the checkpoint in 8-way tensor parallel, i.e. 8 GPUs store a whole model. If you need to do inference on a small number of GPUs, e.g. 4 * RTX 3090 GPUs with INT4 precision, you first need to convert the checkpoint to 4-way tensor parallel using the following command and modify MP_SIZE in corresponding model config file.

python tools/convert_tp.py \
    --input-folder <SRC_CKPT_PATH>  \
    --output-folder <DST_CKPT_PATH> \
    --target-tp 4

Finally, change the model config file from configs/model_glm_130b.sh to configs/model_glm_130b_{int4/int8}.sh in your scripts (e.g. scripts/generate.sh), then run your scripts just as normal.

By default, the full precision checkpoint is expected to be loaded. Run the conversion script with --quantization-bit-width <4 or 8> will produce quantized model weights. To load from a quantized checkpoint, you should add --from-quantized-checkpoint in your model config file.

Evaluation Results

	MMLU（Accuracy↑）	LAMBADA（Accuracy↑ ）	WikiText-2（PPL↓）	WikiText-103（PPL↓）	PTB（PPL↓）
FP16	44.751	80.206	10.901	10.759	18.964
INT8	44.709	80.206	10.904	10.763	18.994
INT4	44.801	79.468	11.167	11.046	19.535

Space and Speed Benchmark

Hardware	GPU Memory	Precison	512	1024	2048
8 * A100	40 GB	FP16	45.21 s	89.00 s	179.22 s
8 * V100	32 GB	INT8	106.35 s	216.50 s	449.17 s
4 * RTX 3090	24 GB	INT4	138.66 s	292.69 s	649.64 s
8 * RTX 2080 Ti	11 GB	INT4	117.39 s	240.96 s	528.66 s

The above results in the table is tests with SAT. Using FasterTransformer can speed up more than 2X, as shown in the table below, and the detailed usage is shown in Inference with FasterTransformer.

Hardware	GPU Memory	Precison	128 Encode / Decode	512 Encode / Decode	1024 Encode / Decode	2048 Encode / Decode
8 * A100	40 GB	INT4	145 ms / 4.29 s	183 ms / 17.7 s	313 ms / 37.8 s	495 ms / 86.0 s
4 * A100	80 GB	INT4	174 ms / 6.62 s	272 ms / 27.1 s	439 ms / 56.2 s	810 ms / 123 s
8 * V100	32 GB	INT4	309 ms / 6.97 s	666 ms / 28.1 s	1208 ms / 58.4 s	2304 ms / 125 s
4 * V100	32 GB	INT4	448 ms / 11.4 s	843 ms / 45.87 s	1488 ms / 93.5 s	2803 ms / 196 s
8 * RTX 3090	24 GB	INT4	283 ms / 5.07 s	915 ms / 20.5 s	1793 ms / 42.7 s	3477 ms / 90.3 s
4 * RTX 3090	24 GB	INT4	374 ms / 8.16 s	1300 ms / 32.3 s	OOM / 66.5 s	OOM / 150 s
8 * RTX 2080 Ti	11 GB	INT4	392 ms / 6.77 s	1044 ms / 27.29 s	OOM / 56.02 s	OOM / OOM

Details

Typical methods quantize both model weights and activations to INT8, enabling the INT8 matrix multiplication kernel for efficiency. However, we found that there are outliers in GLM-130B's activations, making it hard to reduce the precision of activations.

Concurrently, researchers from Meta AI also found the emergent outliers issue in large-scale transformers (>6.8B), which is consistent with our observations on GLM-130B. They conducted an in-depth analysis and found that the outliers make up only about 0.1% of all feature dimensions, so it's possible to make a decomposition for matrix multiplication that focuses on high precision multiplication for these particular dimensions.

Distribution of outliers (the white ones) in GLM-130B's activation

Unfortunately, the outliers in GLM-130B can sometimes make up at most 30% of the feature dimension, possibly because we used GLU as a variant of FFN. Therefore, a mixed-precision decomposition for matmul can be much less efficient than a single FP16 matmul. After a few weeks of trial, we finally decided to keep the precision of activations to FP16 and only consider the quantization of model weights. In that case, the quantized model parameters are dynamically converted to FP16 precision at runtime, introducing a small computational overhead but greatly reducing GPU memory requirements for storing model weights.

We quantized all linear layers as they take up most of the model parameters. All model weights, excluding input/output embedding, layernorm and bias terms are quantized using vector-wise symmetric quantization. At the quantization precision of INT4, two INT4 weights are compressed into one INT8 weight for saving GPU memory usage, so that only 70GB of GPU memory approximately is required for INT4 model weights.