Ring Attention — Long-Context Attention Across GPUs

Why it matters

Long context is the frontier. Understanding ring attention shapes future scale.

The architecture

Sequence split across GPUs.

Query held locally.

KV blocks rotate through ring, computed against local Q.

How it works end to end

Compute-communication overlap: while computing on current KV block, receive next.

Complexity: same total compute as standard attention, distributed.

Combine with flash attention for memory efficiency.