To understand what a Language Processing Unit (or LPU) is, you have to first understand large language models or LLMs. They're a simple enough concept: By drawing on vast amounts of data, LLMs predict the next word that should come in a sequence. Simple in concept, but extremely complex in practice, LLMs can create, classify, and summarize text with coherence and accuracy that rivals text produced by humans. In practical application, LLMs can produce customer support chatbots, generate bespoke product recommendations, write unique marketing content, and provide insightful market research.
Until recently, LLMs have been powered by existing chips and processing systems. But Language Processing Units (LPUs) are custom-built chips and computing systems that promise to accelerate LLM development with never-before-seen speeds and precision. Equipped with storage infrastructures capable of handling their incredible speed and throughput, LPUs are the future of natural language processing—with the potential to radically reshape industries like cybersecurity, government, research, and finance.
What Is a Language Processing Unit (LPU)?
LPU stands for Language Processing Unit; it's a proprietary and specialized chip developed by a company called Groq (not to be mistaken for the artificial intelligence company Grok headed by Elon Musk). Groq designed LPUs specifically to handle the unique speed and memory demands of LLMs. Namely, an LPU is an especially fast processor designed for computationally intensive applications that are sequential in nature rather than parallel—and LLMs are notably sequential.
Related reading: LPU vs GPU: What’s the difference?
The LLM market is a competitive one right now, with giant companies like Nvidia competing to produce the best models for general and specific applications. Groq decided to, rather than compete in that space, double down on producing the best chipset and processing system for running those LLMs.
The key differentiator between an LPU and traditional processors is that LPUs emphasize sequential processing. Today's CPUs are great at numerical calculations, and GPUs excel at parallel computations. But LPUs are specifically designed to address the complex and sequential nature of language, helping train models capable of understanding context, generating coherent responses, and recognizing patterns.
How Does a Language Processing Unit (LPU) Work?
Groq's proprietary LPU is an essential component of its LPU Inference Engine, which is a novel type of processing system. An LPU Inference Engine is a specialized computational environment that addresses compute and memory bandwidth bottlenecks that plague LLMs.
Since an LPU Inference Engine has as much or more compute capacity as a GPU but isn't burdened with external memory bandwidth bottlenecks, an LPU Inference Engine can deliver performance that is measurably orders of magnitude superior to conventional processing systems when training and operating LLMs. That phenomenal throughput has to go somewhere, however, and traditional on-prem data storage solutions can struggle to keep up with an LPU Inference Engine's demands.
LPU Inference Engines operate on a single-core architecture and synchronous networking even across large-scale deployments, and they maintain a high degree of accuracy even at lower precision levels. With excellent sequential performance and near-instant memory access, Groq boasts that the LPU Inference Engine can auto-compile LLMs larger than 50 billion parameters.
Benefits of Using a Language Processing Unit (LPU)
The benefit of using an LPU is quite simple: It's a purpose-built chip and processing system for training LLMs. Without tying you to a particular model or training regimen, the LPU is designed to optimise the efficiency and performance of LLMs, regardless of architecture. AI/ML researchers and developers who are experimenting with different model architectures, data set sizes, and training methodologies can use LPUs to accelerate their research and experiment with different approaches without being constrained by general-purpose hardware.
Current processors and even some data storage solutions can't handle the speed and demand that LLMs need. And as LLMs become even faster, using GPUs to train them will likely become a less viable solution. Since an LPU resides in the data centre alongside the CPUs and GPUs, it's possible to fully integrate LLM development into existing network environments. With sufficiently fast flash-based enterprise storage, an LPU can train and deploy LLMs of unprecedented size and complexity.
When leveraging a specialized architecture that's tailored specifically for a certain task, it's possible to achieve faster processing speeds, higher throughput, and improved precision. Regardless of the end goal of the LLM, whether it's being developed for speech recognition, language translation, or sentiment analysis, an LPU will provide greater efficiency and accuracy than general-purpose hardware will.
Applications of Language Processing Units (LPUs)
LPUs accelerate LLM development and use. Anywhere LLMs are being deployed, incorporating LPUs can dramatically improve efficiency, scalability, and overall performance. It's not just the training process that can be drastically accelerated by LPUs, but faster inference speeds can also be achieved on increasingly large models.
Related reading: What is retrieval-augmented generation?
LPUs accelerate and streamline the development cycle for LLMs. They unlock new possibilities for real-time applications of natural language processing tasks such as chatbots and virtual assistants, language translation and localisation, sentiment analysis, and more. LPUs enhance processing power and efficiency and increase the volume of data that can be processed as well as the speed and accuracy of the results.
All that speed and throughput come with a natural downside, however: whether or not the data centre can provide it with data fast enough, or store and analyse its results. Bottlenecks are a real possibility when using LPUs, hindering the system's overall efficiency and performance.
Through-put, shared and scaled-out data storage architectures like Pure Storage® FlashBlade//S™ are capable of filling the gap that chips and processing systems like LPUs and the LPU Inference Engine have created. Or, when an organisation is looking for a full-blown infrastructure solution, the on-demand, full-stack, AI-ready infrastructure, AIRI®, can handle every component of AI deployment, including LPU-enhanced LLMs.
Conclusion
You may have heard of the Autobahn, a German highway famous for its long stretches without any effective speed limits. Some drivers are very excited to visit Germany and travel on it. But imagine driving the Autobahn in a broken-down old car—you'd never be able to take full advantage of it.
Increasingly, the process of training and deploying large language models is becoming similar to hopping on the Autobahn on a riding lawnmower: The potential is there, but hardware is lacking.
LPUs have been engineered to fill that lack and deliver remarkable processing speeds and throughput, specifically tailored for training LLMs. But simply upgrading to an LPU Inference Engine won't be sufficient if the supporting infrastructure can't keep up with that processed information. Full-flash storage solutions like AIRI and FlashBlade//S can effectively address issues of storage and speed while maximising the potential of LPUs.
