ChunkFlow: Communication-Aware Chunked Prefetching for Layerwise Offloading in Distributed Diffusion Transformer Inference
Layerwise offloading reduces the GPU memory footprint of large diffusion transformer (DiT) inference by prefetching upcoming layers from host memory, but its effectiveness hinges on hiding prefetch latency behind per-layer computation. This assumption breaks down when the per-GPU compute workload is small. Moreover, on PCIe-only nodes, prefetch and inter-GPU collective communications such as all-reduce and all-to-all contend on the shared PCIe path, exposing prefetch latency even when compute would otherwise hide it. We revisit layerwise offloading as a co-scheduling problem between prefetch and communication, guided by a first-order analytical model that predicts when prefetch can be hid...
| Authors | Han Meng, Danny Willow Liu, Dong Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DC |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 May 2026 |
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