noflash-attention 1.0.1

Flash-attention-class memory efficiency for GPUs without flash attention

noflash-attention

Unlock video generation, high-res image synthesis, long-context inference, and extended training on GPUs left behind by Flash Attention.

Without fused attention kernels, PyTorch falls back to Math SDPA — which materializes the full N x N attention matrix and OOMs on any serious workload. This package is a drop-in replacement for F.scaled_dot_product_attention that reduces memory from O(N^2) to O(N) using tiled computation. No fused kernels, no custom ISA, pure PyTorch.

One import. Zero code changes:

pip install noflash-attention

import noflash_attention  # patches SDPA globally — done

Workloads that were impossible — 720p video generation, 1080p audio-video synthesis, 1536x1536 image generation, 16K+ context inference, longer-context fine-tuning — now run within your existing VRAM budget.

---

Who This Is For

Flash Attention and fused SDPA kernels only work on specific hardware. Every other GPU falls back to Math SDPA, which allocates the full N x N score matrix — at 75K tokens (a 5-second 720p video), that's over 500 GB for a single attention layer.

This package exists for GPUs where no efficient SDPA backend is available:

Vendor	GPUs	The Gap
AMD GCN	Vega 56, Vega 64, MI50, MI60, Radeon VII	CK requires MFMA (gfx908+), AOTriton rejects at compile time
AMD RDNA 1	RX 5600 XT, RX 5700, RX 5700 XT	No fused attention in any AMD library
AMD RDNA 2	RX 6600–6900 XT	No fused attention support in CK or AOTriton

These AMD architectures have zero memory-efficient attention support — not Flash Attention, not mem_efficient, nothing. Math SDPA is the only path. This package is the only way to run attention-heavy workloads on these GPUs.

What about NVIDIA? NVIDIA GPUs from Pascal (SM 60) onward have PyTorch's mem_efficient SDPA backend, which already provides O(N) attention memory. Pre-Ampere GPUs (SM < 80) lack Flash Attention specifically, but mem_efficient covers most use cases. Our auto-detection probes for efficient backends at startup and only activates where none exist. You can force-enable with NOFLASH_FORCE_PATCH=1 if needed.

Other hardware (Intel Arc, Apple MPS): Set NOFLASH_FORCE_PATCH=1 to enable.

---

Benchmarks

All benchmarks on the following hardware:

Component	Detail
GPU	AMD Instinct MI50 32GB (gfx906, 60 CUs, HBM2 1024 GB/s)
CPU	Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (single socket)
RAM	128 GB DDR4 ECC
Software	ROCm 7.2, PyTorch 2.x (source build), Ubuntu 24.04
Power limit	150W

Video Generation (via ComfyUI)

Model	Resolution	Duration	Time	Math SDPA
Wan 2.2 5B	832x480	2.5s (41f)	5:04	OOM (needs 38 GB)
Wan 2.2 5B	1280x720	5s (81f)	1:19:39	OOM (needs 522 GB)
LTX-2.3 22B	1280x704	5.2s with audio	20:18	OOM
LTX-2.3 22B	1920x1080	5.2s with audio	1:03:26	OOM

Image Generation

Model	Resolution	Time	VRAM Saved	Speedup
Z-Image Turbo 6B	512x512	22.0s	18%	—
Z-Image Turbo 6B	1024x1024	57.2s	13%	3%
Z-Image Turbo 6B	1536x1536	112.7s	47%	29%

Isolated Attention Microbenchmarks

B=1, H=16, D=64, FP16:

Sequence Length	Math SDPA	noflash-attention	Speedup	VRAM Saved
256	0.28 ms / 47 MB	0.18 ms / 38 MB	1.6x	19%
512	0.55 ms / 79 MB	0.29 ms / 53 MB	1.9x	33%
1024	1.83 ms / 198 MB	0.85 ms / 106 MB	2.2x	46%
2048	8.72 ms / 652 MB	4.74 ms / 308 MB	1.8x	53%
4096	28.81 ms / 2424 MB	17.93 ms / 1096 MB	1.6x	55%
8192	102.42 ms / 9424 MB	72.75 ms / 1124 MB	1.4x	88%
16384	OOM	1325.69 ms / 1202 MB	Only option	—

For extreme memory pressure, Tier 2 (online softmax) provides additional savings:

Config	Tier 1 VRAM	Tier 2 VRAM	Additional Savings
MHA seq=4096	1096 MB	481 MB	56%
MHA seq=8192	1124 MB	514 MB	54%
GQA 14q/2kv seq=4096	965 MB	427 MB	56%

---

How It Works

Math SDPA computes S = Q @ K.T as a single dense matrix — O(N^2) memory. At 75K tokens (a 5s 720p video), that's over 500 GB for a single attention layer.

This package tiles the computation into chunks that fit in ~1 GB, with three tiers of increasing memory efficiency:

F.scaled_dot_product_attention(Q, K, V, ...)
        |
        v
   patched_sdpa
        |
        +-- Non-target GPU or nested tensors --> original SDPA (passthrough)
        |
        +-- BF16 --> FP16 conversion (for GPUs without BF16 hardware)
        |
        +-- seq_q <= 8 and fits in 256MB --> Math SDPA fast path
        |
        +-- Tier 1: chunked_sdpa
        |       PyTorch softmax + GEMMs — fastest, ~2x S+P memory per chunk
        |       Auto block_m sizing, OOM retry with halved blocks
        |
        +-- Tier 2: chunked_sdpa_online
        |       K-tiled streaming softmax — moderate speed, O(block_m * block_n) memory
        |       FP32 accumulation for numerical precision
        |
        +-- Tier 3: chunked_sdpa_inplace
        |       Manual FP16 softmax — slowest, absolute minimum memory
        |       Inference only (in-place ops break autograd)
        |
        +-- All tiers exhausted --> raise OutOfMemoryError

SDPA Patch

We tile along the query dimension:

for i in range(0, N_q, block_m):
    Q_chunk = Q[:, :, i:i+block_m, :]     # small slice of queries
    S_chunk = Q_chunk @ K.transpose(-2,-1) # block_m x N_kv (fits in ~1 GB)
    P_chunk = softmax(S_chunk)
    O_chunk = P_chunk @ V

Peak memory: O(block_m * N_kv) instead of O(N_q * N_kv). The block_m size is auto-tuned to fit in ~1.5 GB with OOM retry at half size.

Tier 2 additionally tiles along the key dimension, streaming the softmax normalization constants — achieving O(block_m * block_n) peak memory with FP32 accumulation for numerical stability.

FFN Chunking

Beyond attention, transformer FFN layers can also be memory-hungry (e.g., 4096 -> 16384 expansion). The patch_ffn API wraps eligible feedforward modules to process tokens in chunks:

import noflash_attention

model = load_your_model()
handle = noflash_attention.patch_ffn(model, num_chunks=0)  # 0 = adaptive
# ... run inference ...
handle.remove()  # restore originals

Safety guarantee: Every module is runtime-verified before chunking. On the first forward pass, the wrapper proves that f(concat(a, b)) == concat(f(a), f(b)) for the actual module and input. Only verified modules are chunked. Verification failure = permanent passthrough.

Automatically rejects: attention modules, MoE layers, modules with internal normalization, tiny projectors.

Supported: MHA, GQA, MQA, causal masks, bool/float attention masks, 4D per-head masks, scale parameter. Full F.scaled_dot_product_attention API compatibility.

---

Installation

From PyPI

pip install noflash-attention

From source

git clone https://github.com/Lowkey-Loki-SN/noflash-attention.git
cd noflash-attention
pip install -e .

Requirements

• Python >= 3.10
• PyTorch >= 2.0
• A supported GPU (or set NOFLASH_FORCE_PATCH=1 for any hardware)

---

Usage

Standalone — any PyTorch model

import noflash_attention  # auto-patches SDPA on import

import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F

Q = torch.randn(1, 16, 4096, 64, device="cuda", dtype=torch.float16)
K = torch.randn(1, 16, 4096, 64, device="cuda", dtype=torch.float16)
V = torch.randn(1, 16, 4096, 64, device="cuda", dtype=torch.float16)
out = F.scaled_dot_product_attention(Q, K, V)  # tiled, O(N) memory

HuggingFace Transformers

import noflash_attention
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="cuda",
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct")

inputs = tokenizer("The capital of France is", return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=50)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

ComfyUI

1. Install the package into your ComfyUI Python environment:

   pip install noflash-attention
   

2. Copy the ComfyUI node into your custom nodes directory:

   cp -r comfyui_node /path/to/ComfyUI/custom_nodes/noflash-attention
   

3. Start ComfyUI. The SDPA patch activates automatically on startup. You'll see:

   [noflash-attn] v1.0.0 — SDPA patched (three-tier chunked attention)
   

4. FFN Chunking (optional): Add the NoFlash FFN Chunking node to your workflow for additional memory savings on feedforward layers.

---

Configuration

Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Description
NOFLASH_FORCE_PATCH	unset	Force-enable on any GPU
NOFLASH_DISABLE	unset	Disable even on supported GPUs
NOFLASH_THRESHOLD	0	Minimum seq_kv to trigger chunked path (0 = always)
NOFLASH_FFN_CHUNKS	0	Default FFN chunk count (0 = adaptive)

API

import noflash_attention

noflash_attention.enable()       # re-enable after disable
noflash_attention.disable()      # restore original SDPA
noflash_attention.is_enabled()   # check patch status

# FFN chunking
handle = noflash_attention.patch_ffn(model, num_chunks=0, verbose=True)
handle.remove()                  # restore original FFN modules
handle.num_wrapped               # number of modules wrapped

---

Known Limitations

• Training: Tier 1 supports autograd (backward pass works). Tiers 2 and 3 are inference-only (in-place ops break autograd).
• Benchmarks: All results are from a single AMD MI50 32GB. Performance on other supported GPUs (Vega 56/64, RX 5000/6000 series) has not been tested and will vary based on memory bandwidth, compute units, and VRAM capacity.
• Multi-GPU: Not tested. The patch applies per-process and should work with data parallelism, but multi-GPU attention strategies (tensor parallelism, ring attention) have not been validated.
• torch.compile: Not tested. Python-level chunking may not be captured by dynamo tracing.
• CUDA graphs: Incompatible (dynamic OOM retry and block sizing).
• Nested tensors: Passed through to original SDPA.
• FP32 inputs: Supported but not optimized. A warning suggests FP16 for 2x faster attention.

---

Development

git clone https://github.com/Lowkey-Loki-SN/noflash-attention.git
cd noflash-attention
pip install -e .
pytest tests/

128 tests covering correctness, GQA/MQA, causal masks, attention masks, online softmax, FFN verification, MoE rejection, and edge cases.

---

License

MIT License. See LICENSE.