Close-up of NVIDIA’s Blackwell-powered NVL72 system designed for large-scale AI inference.
NVIDIA has unveiled a powerful new parallelism technique that could radically improve how AI models operate on massive contexts. Dubbed Helix Parallelism, this innovation allows AI agents to process millions of words simultaneously, like encyclopedias, while delivering lightning-fast responses.
The upgrade was co-designed for Blackwell, NVIDIA’s newest GPU system that brings ultra-high memory bandwidth and FP4 compute to the table.
As AI tools expand in scale and complexity, like legal copilots reading entire case law archives or chatbots tracking months-long conversations, NVIDIA’s breakthrough makes it possible for them to serve more users, faster.
Tackling two key bottlenecks
The main problem with large AI models isn’t just their size. It’s what happens when they try to generate new content using huge backlogs of prior input, called “context.”
Every word the AI produces requires scanning through past tokens stored in what’s called a KV cache. Reading this cache over and over again strains the GPU memory bandwidth.
At the same time, the AI also needs to reload massive Feed-Forward Network (FFN) weights from memory to process each new word. This process slows things down, especially during real-time use cases like chat.
Previously, developers used Tensor Parallelism (TP) to spread out this load across GPUs. But that only helps to a point. After a certain size, GPUs start duplicating the KV cache, leading to even more memory pressure.
Helix fixes this by splitting the attention and FFN parts of a model’s transformer layer and handling them separately. During the attention phase, Helix spreads out the massive KV cache across GPUs using a new method called KV Parallelism (KVP).
It avoids duplication and keeps memory access efficient.
In simple terms, Helix compartmentalizes the work. Instead of every GPU reading the entire history of tokens, each one handles just a slice of it.
Then, the same GPUs shift gears and switch to standard TP mode to run the FFN layer. This reuses resources smartly, keeping GPUs active and reducing idle time.
Helix takes full advantage of NVIDIA’s NVLink and NVL72 interconnects to move data quickly between GPUs.
It also introduces HOP-B, a technique that overlaps GPU communication and computation, reducing delays even further.
Massive performance leap
Simulations using DeepSeek-R1 671B, a massive model with a million-token context, show that Helix can serve up to 32 times more users at the same latency compared to older methods.
It also cuts response time (technically called token-to-token latency) by up to 1.5x in low-concurrency loads.
Even as AI contexts scale into the millions of words, Helix keeps memory usage balanced and throughput consistent.
The system staggers KV cache updates in a round-robin pattern to avoid memory spikes and GPU overload.
In short, Helix allows AI models to scale in both size and speed, without sacrificing real-time performance.
This means virtual assistants, legal bots, and AI copilots can now manage massive workloads while staying responsive.
Newsletter Icon