Release 21.03 (March 31, 2021)

• Build
  • FlexFlow now uses camke build by default, the Makefiles will be deprecated soon.
• Frontend Supports
  • In addition to CFFI, FlexFlow now also supports Python interface via PyBind11. To use ByBind11, please set FF_USE_PYBIND = ON in cmake.
• Distributed inference
  • FlexFlow supports automated performance tuning for both distributed training and inference. For optimizing and performing distributed inference, simply pass comp_node = CompMode::INFERENCE as an additional argument to model.compile. An example can be found at https://github.com/flexflow/FlexFlow/blob/master/examples/python/native/bert_proxy_native.py.
• Runtime
  • FlexFlow now supports gradients update via either Parameter Server or NCCL Allreduce. To enable NCCL, please set FF_USE_NCCL = ON in cmake.
• Operators
  • New operators including Aggregate, Multi-head Attention, Scalar Multiply, Scalar Add, Scalar Sub, Scalar Divide and Top-K.
  • Conv2D now supports group convolutions.
• Examples
  • Unit tests of all operators have been added to the tests/ops folder.