Salca: A Sparsity-Aware Hardware Accelerator for Efficient Long-Context Attention Decoding

TL;DR

Salca is a novel hardware accelerator designed for efficient long-context attention decoding in large language models, combining software sparsity techniques with hardware optimizations to significantly improve speed and energy efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces dual-compression sparse attention and a hardware-optimized architecture, enabling efficient long sequence processing beyond existing accelerators.

Findings

Achieves 3.82× speedup over A100

Delivers 74.19× energy efficiency over A100

First ASIC accelerator supporting long context inference with high throughput

Abstract

Long contexts improve capabilities of large language models but pose serious hardware challenges: compute and memory footprints grow linearly with sequence length. Particularly, the decoding phase continuously accesses massive KV cache, dramatically increasing bandwidth and computing pressure. Existing accelerators are primarily designed and evaluated for short contexts. They suffer from significant performance degradation when processing long contexts. To bridge this gap, we identify the major bottleneck and present a hardware accelerator for long context attention decoding via hardware-software co-design. On the software side, we propose dual-compression dynamic sparse attention. It combines ultra-low-precision quantization with feature sparsity to minimize prediction overhead. A hardware-friendly approximate Top-K selection further reduces filter complexity from $O(n \log k)$ to $O(n)$. On the hardware side, we deeply optimize compute and memory access to tackle bottlenecks from intricate interplay between sparse attention and long contexts, and establish a performance model to derive the optimal co-design scheme. The resulting hardware adopts a fully pipelined parallel architecture and achieves $O(n)$ efficiency even for long sequences. Experiments show that our design delivers $3.82\times$ speedup and $74.19\times$ energy efficiency over A100. Compared to SOTA accelerators, this is the first ASIC accelerator that efficiently supports long context inference, with at least $3.5\times$ higher throughput and $2.08\times$ better energy efficiency.