Parallel Track Transformers: Enabling Fast GPU Inference with Reduced Synchronization

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Authors: Chong Wang, Nan Du, Tom Gunter, Tao Lei, K. Seth, Senyu Tong, Jianyu Wang, Guoli Yin, Xiyou Zhou, Kelvin Zou, Ruoming Pang
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Efficient large-scale inference of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental systems challenge, frequently requiring multi-GPU parallelism to meet stringent latency and throughput targets. Conventional tensor parallelism decomposes matrix operations across devices but introduces substantial inter-GPU synchronization, leading to communication bottlenecks and degraded scalability. We propose the Parallel Track (PT) Transformer, a novel architectural paradigm that restructures computation to minimize cross-device dependencies. PT achieves up to a 16x reduction in synchronization operations relative to standard tensor parallelism, while maintaining competitive model quality in our experiments. We integrate PT into two widely adopted LLM serving stacks-Tensor-RT-LLM and vLLM-and report consistent improvements in serving efficiency, including up to 15-30% reduced time to first token, 2-12% reduced time per output token, and up to 31.90% increased throughput in both settings.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques Natural Language Processing Techniques Topic Modeling

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
7 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint