FastUSP: A Multi-Level Collaborative Acceleration Framework for Distributed Diffusion Model Inference

TL;DR

FastUSP introduces a multi-level optimization framework that significantly accelerates distributed diffusion model inference on multi-GPU systems by reducing kernel launch overhead and improving computation-communication efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-level optimization framework combining compile, communication, and operator-level techniques to enhance USP-based distributed diffusion inference.

Findings

Achieves 1.12x–1.16x speedup on FLUX with 12B parameters.

Attains 1.09x speedup on Qwen-Image with 2 GPUs.

Kernel launch overhead is identified as the main bottleneck in modern GPU interconnects.

Abstract

Large-scale diffusion models such as FLUX (12B parameters) and Stable Diffusion 3 (8B parameters) require multi-GPU parallelism for efficient inference. Unified Sequence Parallelism (USP), which combines Ulysses and Ring attention mechanisms, has emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for distributed attention computation. However, existing USP implementations suffer from significant inefficiencies including excessive kernel launch overhead and suboptimal computation-communication scheduling. In this paper, we propose \textbf{FastUSP}, a multi-level optimization framework that integrates compile-level optimization (graph compilation with CUDA Graphs and computation-communication reordering), communication-level optimization (FP8 quantized collective communication), and operator-level optimization (pipelined Ring attention with double buffering). We evaluate FastUSP on FLUX (12B) and Qwen-Image models across 2, 4, and 8 NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs. On FLUX, FastUSP achieves consistent \textbf{1.12$\times$--1.16$\times$} end-to-end speedup over baseline USP, with compile-level optimization contributing the dominant improvement. On Qwen-Image, FastUSP achieves \textbf{1.09$\times$} speedup on 2 GPUs; on 4--8 GPUs, we identify a PyTorch Inductor compatibility limitation with Ring attention that prevents compile optimization, while baseline USP scales to 1.30$\times$--1.46$\times$ of 2-GPU performance. We further provide a detailed analysis of the performance characteristics of distributed diffusion inference, revealing that kernel launch overhead -- rather than communication latency -- is the primary bottleneck on modern high-bandwidth GPU interconnects.