Muhammad Azlan Qazi

Muhammad Azlan Qazi, Alexandros Iosifidis, Qi Zhang

Distributing Transformer inference across embedded edge devices can alleviate individual memory and compute constraints, yet practical benefits on real hardware remain unclear: prior work relies largely on simulations that overlook hardware-specific communication overheads. We present a hardware prototype study on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano devices connected over WiFi. Our key finding is that the dominant bottleneck is not just network bandwidth but also the CPU-GPU staging during communication. Because Jetson's integrated GPU architecture lacks the PCIe/NVLink pathway that NCCL requires, all inter-device data communication should be routed through GLOO and staged in CPU memory; an overhead that scales with communication data volume and makes full-tensor exchange slower than single-device inference across the batch sizes for medium sized models such as ViT. We therefore evaluate Prism by combining Segment Means compression with lightweight offline profiling to adaptively select between local and distributed execution at runtime. Experiments show that this strategy reduces latency by 65%-77% and energy consumption by 34%-52% relative to full-tensor exchange in static distributed execution setup, demonstrating that profiling-driven adaptation is essential for practical distributed Transformer inference on embedded hardware.

Muhammad Azlan Qazi, Alexandros Iosifidis, Qi Zhang

Foundation models (FMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, from image classification to natural langurage processing, but pose significant challenges for deployment at edge. This has sparked growing interest in developing practical and efficient strategies for bringing foundation models to edge environments. In this work, we propose PRISM, a communication-efficient and compute-aware strategy for distributed Transformer inference on edge devices. Our method leverages a Segment Means representation to approximate intermediate output features, drastically reducing inter-device communication. Additionally, we restructure the self-attention mechanism to eliminate redundant computations caused by per-device Key/Value calculation in position-wise partitioning and design a partition-aware causal masking scheme tailored for autoregressive models. We evaluate PRISM on ViT, BERT, and GPT-2 across diverse datasets, namely CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, GLUE, and CBT. Our results demonstrate substantial reductions in communication overhead (up to 99.2% for BERT at compression rate CR = 128) and per-device computation (51.24% for BERT at the same setting), with only minor accuracy degradation. This method offers a scalable and practical solution for deploying foundation models in distributed resource-constrained environments.