Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion (SD) [[Paper]](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752v2.pdf) is a powerful generative model that can produce high-quality images based on textual descriptions. By decomposing the image formation process into a sequential application of denoising autoencoders, diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art synthesis results on image data and beyond. However, due to their direct operation in pixel space, optimization of powerful DMs is computationally expensive and can consume hundreds of GPU days. To address this challenge, the SD model is applied in the latent space of powerful pretrained autoencoders. This enables DM training on limited computational resources while retaining their quality and flexibility, greatly boosting visual fidelity.

The SD model also introduces cross-attention layers into the model architecture, allowing it to turn diffusion models into powerful and flexible generators for general conditioning inputs such as text or bounding boxes. As a result, the SD model achieves a new state of the art for image inpainting and highly competitive performance on various tasks, including unconditional image generation, semantic scene synthesis, and super-resolution. Additionally, the SD model significantly reduces computational requirements compared to pixel-based DMs, making it an attractive solution for a wide range of applications.

Feature

Training

Inference

Data parallelism Yes N/A
Tensor parallelism No No
Pipeline parallelism No No
Sequence parallelism No No
Activation checkpointing No No
FP32/TF32 Yes Yes (FP16 enabled by default)
AMP/FP16 Yes Yes
AMP/BF16 No No
BF16 O2 No No
TransformerEngine/FP8 No No
Multi-GPU Yes Yes
Multi-Node Yes Yes
Inference deployment N/A NVIDIA Triton supported
SW stack support Slurm DeepOps/Base Command Manager/Base Command Platform Slurm DeepOps/Base Command Manager/Base Command Platform
NVfuser No N/A
Distributed Optimizer No N/A
TorchInductor Yes N/A
Flash Attention Yes N/A
NHWC GroupNorm Yes Yes
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