huggingface / huggingface/candle

Why isn't SDPA supported in cuda within candle?

Open
#2,725 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
21.1k
Forks
1.8k
Avg merge
16h 42m
Merged PRs (30d)
25

Description

Hi all, forgive my ignorance but my understanding is that SDPA is cuda compatible but I can't find an implementation within candle_nn for it. I want to run some transformer models (mainly whisper) on T4 GPUs (which don't support flash-attention 2) and want to extract more performance. Optimally, would like something similar to the python transformers library where SDPA is by default used when able.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start in candle_nn by tracing the existing attention implementations and checking how CUDA-backed paths are selected. Compare the available options for T4 GPUs with the requested SDPA behavior for transformer and Whisper workloads; done means an SDPA path is available when supported and a suitable fallback remains for unsupported hardware.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
machine-learning, performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.