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The Sequence Opinion #489: CRAZY: How DeepSeek R1 Bypassed CUDA with Lower-Level GPU Optimization Techniques

The Sequence Opinion #489: CRAZY: How DeepSeek R1 Bypassed CUDA with Lower-Level GPU Optimization Techniques

Have you heard of NVIDIA's PTX and NCCL?

Feb 13, 2025
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The Sequence Opinion #489: CRAZY: How DeepSeek R1 Bypassed CUDA with Lower-Level GPU Optimization Techniques
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A lot has been written about DeepSeek R1 and its clever innvoations over the last few weeks. However, one of the aspects that hasn’t received a lot of attention has been their work on GPU level optimizations. It makes sense that DeepSeek has to do some work in that are considering some of the reported GPU constraints they were dealing with but when I read about this in the technical report I thought it was a mistake. The level of optimization is insane to the point of bypassing NVIDIA’s CUDA altogether and leverage PTX programming, utilize NCCL for communication efficiency, and adopt other advanced techniques.

Overview of CUDA and Its Limitations

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is NVIDIA's proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that enables developers to harness the computational power of GPUs for general-purpose processing. It provides high-level abstractions for GPU programming, making it accessible to developers through languages like C++ and Python.

Strengths of CUDA

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