flash-comm: Self-Synchronizing Collective Communication for LLM Decoding

Abstract

We present flash-comm, a communication library that achieves efficient transport for LLM decoding by fusing readiness synchronization with data movement. flash-comm introduces self-synchronizing transfers in which each data block carries evidence of its readiness, allowing receivers to directly validate the blocks they need without separate inter-GPU barriers. Based on this principle, a cost-guided protocol selector adapts the readiness encoding to message size and the number of participating GPUs, balancing synchronization overhead against additional data-transfer cost. flash-comm further decouples transport order from reduction order to preserve result consistency across GPUs under asynchronous data arrivals. On a server with eight NVIDIA B300 GPUs, flash-comm reduces all-reduce latency by a median of 28.8% and up to 43.7% compared with custom AR v2 (the state-of-the-art all-reduce implementation). In end-to-end decoding, flash-comm reduces time per output token (TPOT) by 1.7-6.8%. Note that all-reduce accounts for 11.4% of the baseline decoding time, which bounds the latency reduction possible from optimizing this operation alone. The same mechanism also supports standalone all-gather, reducing latency by a median of 23.8% and up to 58.9% across eight B300 GPUs.