Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into many online services. However, a major challenge in deploying LLMs is their high cost, due primarily to the use of expensive GPU instances. To address this problem, we find that the significant heterogeneity of GPU types presents an opportunity to increase GPU cost efficiency and reduce deployment costs. The broad and growing market of GPUs creates a diverse option space with varying costs and hardware specifications. Within this space, we show that there is not a linear relationship between GPU cost and performance, and identify three key LLM service characteristics that significantly affect which GPU type is the most cost effective: model request size, request rate, and latency service-level objective (SLO). We then present M\'elange, a framework for navigating the diversity of GPUs and LLM service specifications to derive the most cost-efficient set of GPUs for a given LLM service. We frame the task of GPU selection as a cost-aware bin-packing problem, where GPUs are bins with a capacity and cost, and items are request slices defined by a request size and rate. Upon solution, M\'elange derives the minimal-cost GPU allocation that adheres to a configurable latency SLO. Our evaluations across both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that M\'elange can reduce deployment costs by up to 77% as compared to utilizing only a single GPU type, highlighting the importance of making heterogeneity-aware GPU provisioning decisions for LLM serving. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/tyler-griggs/melange-release.

Collocating deep learning training tasks improves GPU utilization but causes drastic slowdowns due to resource contention and risks Out-of-Memory (OOM) failures. Accurate memory estimation is essential for robust collocation, while GPU utilization -- a key proxy for resource contention -- enables interference-aware scheduling to reduce slowdowns and improve throughput. Existing GPU memory estimators span three paradigms -- analytical models, CPU-side libraries, and ML-based estimators -- each with distinct limitations: dependence on detailed model specifications, intrusive integration, poor generalization, and varying latency overhead. GPU heterogeneity further complicates estimation, as identical tasks can exhibit markedly different memory footprints across hardware generations. GPU utilization remains comparatively understudied, further complicated by the non-additive nature of utilization metrics and hardware sensitivity. We conduct a systematic analysis of representative estimators from each paradigm -- Horus, PyTorch FakeTensor, and our lightweight ML-based estimator -- evaluating accuracy, generalizability, and practical overhead. We construct a synthetic dataset spanning MLPs, CNNs, and Transformers with controlled architectural variations, and train MLP- and Transformer-based estimators for memory prediction. We further experiment with utilization estimation on the same dataset. Our evaluation reveals key tradeoffs and validates estimators against real-world unseen models. Significant challenges remain: analytical models are hardware-dependent, CPU-side libraries impose intrusive integration costs, and ML-based estimators struggle with cross-architecture generalization. We release all datasets, tools, and artifacts to support further research.

Deploying a large language model (LLM) inference service remains costly because centralized serving depends on specialized GPU clusters and high-bandwidth interconnects in datacenters. An appealing alternative is to leverage collaborative decentralized GPU pools. However, heterogeneity in GPU and limited interconnected network bandwidth, along with potentially dynamic availability, make efficient scheduling the central challenge in this scenario. In this paper, we present Parallax, a decentralized LLM serving system that turns a pool of heterogeneous GPUs into an efficient inference platform via a two-phase scheduler. Parallax decomposes planning into (i) model allocation, which places layers of each replica across diverse GPUs to jointly optimize latency and throughput under memory and link-bandwidth constraints, and (ii) request-time GPU pipeline selection, which stitches layers from different replicas into end-to-end execution chains that balance load and adapt to current conditions. We implement Parallax and evaluate it on open-source LLMs deployed over real volunteer nodes. Parallax consistently reduces latency and increases throughput relative to decentralized baselines, demonstrating that principled scheduling can make volunteer compute a practical, affordable substrate for LLM inference. Github Repo at: https://github.com/GradientHQ/parallax.

Single-cell sequencing technologies reveal cellular heterogeneity at high resolution, advancing our understanding of biological complexity. As datasets start to scale to tens of millions of cells, computational workflows face substantial bottlenecks, with CPU-based analytical pipelines requiring hours or days for routine processing steps like filtering, normalization, and clustering. These scalability limitations fundamentally restrict common interactive data exploration and iterative hypothesis testing. Here we introduce rapids-singlecell, a GPU-accelerated framework that integrates natively with the scverse ecosystem and operates directly on the AnnData data structure, which delivers orders-of-magnitude speedups for single-cell workflows. Built on CuPy arrays and the NVIDIA CUDA-X Data Science (RAPIDS) ecosystem, rapids-singlecell provides near drop-in GPU replacements for core scanpy-based analysis steps. Across standard single-cell workflows such as preprocessing, dimensionality reduction, neighborhood graph construction, clustering, and batch correction, rapids-singlecell achieves speedups of up to several hundred-fold compared to optimized CPU baselines. This reduces analysis time from hours to minutes on standard hardware, while maintaining consistent biological interpretations. These performance improvements make it possible to analyze large data sets in close to real time, without the need for data splitting. Together with real-time parameter tuning and iterative workflows, rapids-singlecell makes interactive large-scale single-cell analysis possible.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend LLMs with visual understanding through a three-stage pipeline: multimodal preprocessing, vision encoding, and LLM inference. While these stages enhance capability, they introduce significant system bottlenecks. First, multimodal preprocessing-especially video decoding-often dominates Time-to-First-Token (TTFT). Most systems rely on CPU-based decoding, which severely limits throughput, while existing GPU-based approaches prioritize throughput-oriented parallelism and fail to meet the latency-sensitive requirements of MLLM inference. Second, the vision encoder is a standalone, compute-intensive stage that produces visual embeddings and cannot be co-batched with LLM prefill or decoding. This heterogeneity forces inter-stage blocking and increases token-generation latency. Even when deployed on separate GPUs, these stages underutilize available compute and memory resources, reducing overall utilization and constraining system throughput. To address these challenges, we present FlashCodec and UnifiedServe, two complementary designs that jointly optimize the end-to-end MLLM pipeline. FlashCodec accelerates the multimodal preprocessing stage through collaborative multi-GPU video decoding, reducing decoding latency while preserving high throughput. UnifiedServe optimizes the vision-to-text and inference stages using a logically decoupled their execution to eliminate inter-stage blocking, yet physically sharing GPU resources to maximize GPU system utilization. By carefully orchestrating execution across stages and minimizing interference, UnifiedServe Together, our proposed framework forms an end-to-end optimized stack that can serve up to 3.0times more requests or enforce 1.5times tighter SLOs, while achieving up to 4.4times higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems.

Running large language models on consumer devices such as laptops and desktops is challenging because model weights often exceed GPU memory capacity, making offloading inference necessary to extend effective model capacity with CPU memory. Existing offloading systems, however, typically rely on coarse layer-level or expert-level scheduling, which overlooks substantial heterogeneity among tensors within the same layer and adapts poorly to changing hardware load conditions on such devices. This paper presents ATSInfer, a hybrid CPU-GPU inference system for consumer devices that performs offloading at tensor granularity. ATSInfer combines static tensor placement with load-aware dynamic transfer, and introduces asynchronous CPU-GPU coordination to efficiently schedule hardware storage, data movement, and computation across heterogeneous backends. We implement ATSInfer and evaluate it on representative consumer platforms using both dense and MoE models. Compared with existing systems, ATSInfer improves prefill throughput by up to 1.94times and decode throughput by up to 3.29times, while also increasing GPU utilization and making more effective use of PCIe bandwidth. These results show that ATSInfer can substantially improve the user experience of local LLM deployment on personal consumer devices.

Emergency of DeepSeek R1 and QwQ 32B have broken through performance barriers for running frontier large language models (LLMs) on home devices. While consumer hardware is getting stronger and model quantization is improving, existing end-side solutions still demand GPU clusters, large RAM/VRAM, and high bandwidth, far beyond what a common home cluster can handle. This paper introduces prima.cpp, a distributed inference system that runs 70B-scale models on everyday home devices using a mix of CPU/GPU, low RAM/VRAM, Wi-Fi, and cross-platform support. It uses mmap to manage model weights and introduces piped-ring parallelism with prefetching to hide disk loading. By modeling heterogeneity in computation, communication, disk, memory (and its management behavior), and OS, it optimally assigns model layers to each device's CPU and GPU, further reducing token latency. An elegant algorithm named Halda is proposed to solve this NP-hard assignment problem. We evaluate prima.cpp on a common four-node home cluster. It outperforms llama.cpp, exo, and dllama on 30B+ models while keeping memory pressure below 6%. This brings frontier 30B-70B models, such as Llama 3, DeepSeek R1, Qwen 2.5, and QwQ to home assistants, making advanced AI truly accessible to individuals. The code is open source and available at https://github.com/Lizonghang/prima.cpp.

Streaming video generation is emerging as a new serving workload in which users interact with long-lived sessions that generate video progressively, chunk by chunk. Unlike offline video generation or typical LLM serving, streaming video generation must preserve session state across active and idle periods, repeatedly schedule ongoing sessions, and deliver each chunk under a tight latency target. This creates two key serving challenges in multi-user, multi-GPU environments: session duration heterogeneity, where long-running sessions make placement decisions suboptimal over time, and temporal user-demand heterogeneity, where the number of active sessions fluctuates sharply across bursts and idle periods. We present TurboServe, the first serving system designed specifically for streaming video generation workloads. TurboServe formulates serving as an online scheduling problem that jointly coordinates session placement and GPU provisioning. Its closed-loop scheduling algorithm combines a migration-aware placement controller, which rebalances sessions across GPUs to reduce the maximum per-chunk latency, with a load-driven autoscaling controller, which adapts the GPU budget to workload variation for improved cost efficiency. To support these decisions at runtime, TurboServe implements coalesced chunk processing for batching concurrent active sessions on the same GPU, GPU-CPU offloading for session suspension and resumption, and NCCL-based GPU-GPU migration for online rebalancing. We evaluate TurboServe on real-world production traces from Shengshu Technology across multiple model sizes and GPU clusters with up to 64 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. Compared with baseline serving configurations, TurboServe reduces worst-case per-chunk latency by 37.5% and total GPU operating cost by 37.2% on average. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/shengshu-ai/TurboServe.

The rapid growth of Large Transformer-based models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), now scaling to trillions of parameters, has necessitated training across thousands of GPUs using complex hybrid parallelism strategies (e.g., data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism). Checkpointing this massive, distributed state is critical for a wide range of use cases, such as resilience, suspend-resume, investigating undesirable training trajectories, and explaining model evolution. However, existing checkpointing solutions typically treat model state as opaque binary blobs, ignoring the ``3D heterogeneity'' of the underlying data structures--varying by memory location (GPU vs. Host), number of ``logical'' objects sharded and split across multiple files, data types (tensors vs. Python objects), and their serialization requirements. This results in significant runtime overheads due to blocking device-to-host transfers, data-oblivious serialization, and storage I/O contention. In this paper, we introduce DataStates-LLM, a novel checkpointing architecture that leverages State Providers to decouple state abstraction from data movement. DataStates-LLM exploits the immutability of model parameters during the forward and backward passes to perform ``lazy'', non-blocking asynchronous snapshots. By introducing State Providers, we efficiently coalesce fragmented, heterogeneous shards and overlap the serialization of metadata with bulk tensor I/O. We evaluate DataStates-LLM on models up to 70B parameters on 256 A100-40GB GPUs. Our results demonstrate that DataStates-LLM achieves up to 4times higher checkpointing throughput and reduces end-to-end training time by up to 2.2times compared to state-of-the-art solutions, effectively mitigating the serialization and heterogeneity bottlenecks in extreme-scale LLM training.

Multi-turn LLM serving accumulates dialogue history whose Key-Value (KV) cache grows with every turn and every user, quickly exceeding the model weights themselves and making memory -- not compute -- the binding constraint on throughput. Non-uniform KV compression, which allocates heterogeneous budgets across attention heads, preserves accuracy far better than uniform schemes, yet remains impractical: modern serving stacks assume identical KV lengths across heads, so heterogeneity traps freed memory as page fragmentation, spends up to 25% of prefill time reclaiming scattered pages, and skews GPU workloads that inflate decode latency by up to 1.7times or burn 15--20% of each decode step on re-planning. We observe that this heterogeneity need not be discovered at runtime: head-wise retention follows a two-level structural regularity -- an input-invariant head ranking with narrowly bounded per-head ratios -- that can be calibrated offline from as few as 50 samples. Building on this insight, we present Tangram, a serving framework that statically resolves what prior systems handle dynamically: Budget Reservation fixes each head's post-compression footprint at scheduling time, eliminating page reclamation; Ragged Paging clusters similar-budget heads into independent page tables, turning fragmentation into reclaimable memory; and Ahead-of-Time Load Balancing precomputes balanced GPU partitions with zero runtime planning. Implemented on vLLM, Tangram serves as a drop-in substrate for existing non-uniform compression methods, matching their accuracy while improving end-to-end throughput by up to 2.6times over the full-KV baseline. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/TANGRAM.

Training transformer models requires substantial GPU compute and memory resources. In homogeneous clusters, distributed strategies allocate resources evenly, but this approach is inefficient for heterogeneous clusters, where GPUs differ in power and memory. As high-end GPUs are costly and limited in availability, heterogeneous clusters with diverse GPU types are becoming more common. Existing methods attempt to balance compute across GPUs based on capacity but often underutilize compute due to memory constraints. We present Cephalo, a system that optimizes compute and memory usage by decoupling compute distribution from training state assignment. Cephalo outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving significantly higher training throughput while supporting larger models and batch sizes.

On the way to Exascale, programmers face the increasing challenge of having to support multiple hardware architectures from the same code base. At the same time, portability of code and performance are increasingly difficult to achieve as hardware architectures are becoming more and more diverse. Today's heterogeneous systems often include two or more completely distinct and incompatible hardware execution models, such as GPGPU's, SIMD vector units, and general purpose cores which conventionally have to be programmed using separate tool chains representing non-overlapping programming models. The recent revival of interest in the industry and the wider community for the C++ language has spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications in the arena of concurrency and parallelism. This recently includes an increasing amount of discussion around the need for a uniform, higher-level abstraction and programming model for parallelism in the C++ standard targeting heterogeneous and distributed computing. Such an abstraction should perfectly blend with existing, already standardized language and library features, but should also be generic enough to support future hardware developments. In this paper, we present the results from developing such a higher-level programming abstraction for parallelism in C++ which aims at enabling code and performance portability over a wide range of architectures and for various types of parallelism. We present and compare performance data obtained from running the well-known STREAM benchmark ported to our higher level C++ abstraction with the corresponding results from running it natively. We show that our abstractions enable performance at least as good as the comparable base-line benchmarks while providing a uniform programming API on all compared target architectures.

Large language models (LLMs) require vast amounts of GPU compute to train, but limited availability and high costs of GPUs make homogeneous clusters impractical for many organizations. Instead, assembling heterogeneous clusters by pooling together GPUs of different generations allows them to achieve higher aggregate compute and make use of all available GPUs. However, training on heterogeneous clusters presents several challenges, including load balancing across GPUs, optimizing memory usage to accommodate varying memory capacities, and ensuring communication-efficient training over diverse network interconnects potentially spanning multiple datacenters. In this paper, we make the case that efficient training on heterogeneous clusters requires (1) the integration of pipeline parallelism and data parallelism in a manner that is both communication- and memory-efficient, and (2) a more adaptable configuration of pipeline and data parallelism, which includes the capability to flexibly partition GPUs into asymmetric pipeline parallel stages and to incorporate heterogeneous GPUs within the same data parallelism group. We propose Zorse, the first system to unify all these capabilities while incorporating a planner that automatically configures training strategies for a given workload. Our evaluation shows that Zorse significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in heterogeneous training scenarios.

Agentic inference now dominates the LLM inference landscape, requiring LLMs to actively engage in multi-turn interactions with tool-calling capabilities. This introduces a more complex workload for the underlying inference system: serving stages such as prefill and decode exhibit substantially different behaviors and demand distinct compute and memory-bandwidth capabilities. As a result, a single homogeneous GPU system now struggles to support agentic inference, motivating an industry shift toward heterogeneous systems with disaggregated serving capabilities, such as the emerging Vera-Rubin platform with GPUs and Groq LPUs. However, the question of what the optimal hardware should look like for each component in a heterogeneous system remains underexplored. To this end, we propose a novel simulation framework for disaggregated serving, termed HeteroPanacea, that enables system-level simulation across three dimensions: 1) disaggregated quantization, 2) automated intra- and inter-device parallelization scheduling, and 3) PDAF (prefill-decode-attention-FFN) NPU architectural heterogeneity. By combining these three axes, we provide a cross-stack simulation framework for future heterogeneous agentic serving systems. We confirm the benefit of Prefill Decode disaggregation, simulating increased serving throughput by up to 75\% compared to traditional serving with current GPUs and demonstrate 4 way Prefill Decode Attention FFN disaggregation is the most consistent for increasing throughput across different models, assuming custom NPUs. We also investigate the relationship between model architecture and gain from disaggregation by running a set of ablation studies.

The efficiency of Federated Learning (FL) is often affected by both data and device heterogeneities. Data heterogeneity is defined as the heterogeneity of data distributions on different clients. Device heterogeneity is defined as the clients' variant latencies in uploading their local model updates due to heterogeneous conditions of local hardware resources, and causes the problem of staleness when being addressed by asynchronous FL. Traditional schemes of tackling the impact of staleness consider data and device heterogeneities as two separate and independent aspects in FL, but this assumption is unrealistic in many practical FL scenarios where data and device heterogeneities are intertwined. In these cases, traditional schemes of weighted aggregation in FL have been proved to be ineffective, and a better approach is to convert a stale model update into a non-stale one. In this paper, we present a new FL framework that leverages the gradient inversion technique for such conversion, hence efficiently tackling unlimited staleness in clients' model updates. Our basic idea is to use gradient inversion to get estimations of clients' local training data from their uploaded stale model updates, and use these estimations to compute non-stale client model updates. In this way, we address the problem of possible data quality drop when using gradient inversion, while still preserving the clients' local data privacy. We compared our approach with the existing FL strategies on mainstream datasets and models, and experiment results demonstrate that when tackling unlimited staleness, our approach can significantly improve the trained model accuracy by up to 20% and speed up the FL training progress by up to 35%.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT, AI agents, and video generation, contemporary mobile systems have begun integrating these AI capabilities on local devices to enhance privacy and reduce response latency. To meet the computational demands of AI tasks, current mobile SoCs are equipped with diverse AI accelerators, including GPUs and Neural Processing Units (NPUs). However, there has not been a comprehensive characterization of these heterogeneous processors, and existing designs typically only leverage a single AI accelerator for LLM inference, leading to suboptimal use of computational resources and memory bandwidth. In this paper, we first summarize key performance characteristics of heterogeneous processors, SoC memory bandwidth, etc. Drawing on these observations, we propose different heterogeneous parallel mechanisms to fully exploit both GPU and NPU computational power and memory bandwidth. We further design a fast synchronization mechanism between heterogeneous processors that leverages the unified memory architecture. By employing these techniques, we present HeteroInfer, the fastest LLM inference engine in mobile devices which supports GPU-NPU heterogeneous execution. Evaluation shows that HeteroInfer delivers a 1.34x to 6.02x end-to-end speedup over state-of-the-art GPU-only and NPU-only LLM engines, while maintaining negligible interference with other applications.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are continually evolving to cater to the computational demands of contemporary general-purpose workloads, particularly those driven by artificial intelligence (AI) utilizing deep learning techniques. A substantial body of studies have been dedicated to dissecting the microarchitectural metrics characterizing diverse GPU generations, which helps researchers understand the hardware details and leverage them to optimize the GPU programs. However, the latest Hopper GPUs present a set of novel attributes, including new tensor cores supporting FP8, DPX, and distributed shared memory. Their details still remain mysterious in terms of performance and operational characteristics. In this research, we propose an extensive benchmarking study focused on the Hopper GPU. The objective is to unveil its microarchitectural intricacies through an examination of the new instruction-set architecture (ISA) of Nvidia GPUs and the utilization of new CUDA APIs. Our approach involves two main aspects. Firstly, we conduct conventional latency and throughput comparison benchmarks across the three most recent GPU architectures, namely Hopper, Ada, and Ampere. Secondly, we delve into a comprehensive discussion and benchmarking of the latest Hopper features, encompassing the Hopper DPX dynamic programming (DP) instruction set, distributed shared memory, and the availability of FP8 tensor cores. The microbenchmarking results we present offer a deeper understanding of the novel GPU AI function units and programming features introduced by the Hopper architecture. This newfound understanding is expected to greatly facilitate software optimization and modeling efforts for GPU architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this study makes the first attempt to demystify the tensor core performance and programming instruction sets unique to Hopper GPUs.

This paper presents a comprehensive comparison of three dominant parallel programming models in High Performance Computing (HPC): Message Passing Interface (MPI), Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Selecting optimal programming approaches for modern heterogeneous HPC architectures has become increasingly critical. We systematically analyze these models across multiple dimensions: architectural foundations, performance characteristics, domain-specific suitability, programming complexity, and recent advancements. We examine each model's strengths, weaknesses, and optimization techniques. Our investigation demonstrates that MPI excels in distributed memory environments with near-linear scalability for communication-intensive applications, but faces communication overhead challenges. OpenMP provides strong performance and usability in shared-memory systems and loop-centric tasks, though it is limited by shared memory contention. CUDA offers substantial performance gains for data-parallel GPU workloads, but is restricted to NVIDIA GPUs and requires specialized expertise. Performance evaluations across scientific simulations, machine learning, and data analytics reveal that hybrid approaches combining two or more models often yield optimal results in heterogeneous environments. The paper also discusses implementation challenges, optimization best practices, and emerging trends such as performance portability frameworks, task-based programming, and the convergence of HPC and Big Data. This research helps developers and researchers make informed decisions when selecting programming models for modern HPC applications, emphasizing that the best choice depends on application requirements, hardware, and development constraints.

The increasing complexity of machine learning models and the proliferation of diverse hardware architectures (CPUs, GPUs, accelerators) make achieving optimal performance a significant challenge. Heterogeneity in instruction sets, specialized kernel requirements for different data types and model features (e.g., sparsity, quantization), and architecture-specific optimizations complicate performance tuning. Manual optimization is resource-intensive, while existing automatic approaches often rely on complex hardware-specific heuristics and uninterpretable intermediate representations, hindering performance portability. We introduce PerfLLM, a novel automatic optimization methodology leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Central to this is PerfDojo, an environment framing optimization as an RL game using a human-readable, mathematically-inspired code representation that guarantees semantic validity through transformations. This allows effective optimization without prior hardware knowledge, facilitating both human analysis and RL agent training. We demonstrate PerfLLM's ability to achieve significant performance gains across diverse CPU (x86, Arm, RISC-V) and GPU architectures.

Reproducibility is essential for scientific research. However, in computer vision, achieving consistent results is challenging due to various factors. One influential, yet often unrecognized, factor is CUDA-induced randomness. Despite CUDA's advantages for accelerating algorithm execution on GPUs, if not controlled, its behavior across multiple executions remains non-deterministic. While reproducibility issues in ML being researched, the implications of CUDA-induced randomness in application are yet to be understood. Our investigation focuses on this randomness across one standard benchmark dataset and two real-world datasets in an isolated environment. Our results show that CUDA-induced randomness can account for differences up to 4.77% in performance scores. We find that managing this variability for reproducibility may entail increased runtime or reduce performance, but that disadvantages are not as significant as reported in previous studies.

Training and deployed inference often cross export, conversion, and platform-specific runtime boundaries. Meganeura asks whether one compact native compiler can span both phases on consumer GPUs. Its typed static graph, automatic differentiation, optimizer, checkpoint, memory planner, and runtime lower specialized programs through Vulkan and Metal. We compare five matched workloads with PyTorch on NVIDIA and AMD discrete GPUs, an AMD APU, Apple silicon, and an Intel iGPU. The protocol separates strict f32 from validated fast paths and gates forward and backward independently. Forty-eight of 50 device-workload-mode cells pass both gates; the other two share one unresolved backward-reference disagreement on a newly supported APU. In strict f32, Meganeura wins 12 of 20 GPU-referenced minimal-latency cells and has a median valid training gap of 1.8x. On the discrete AMD GPU, four of five inference workloads are within 1.10x of compiled ROCm PyTorch and three training workloads are faster. Under accelerated contracts, the worst training gap is 4.6x. Compilation takes 0.1-2.4 seconds versus 6-96 seconds for torch.compile on supported GPU paths; the stripped binary is 13 MiB. Dispatch profiles localize the largest gaps to convolution derivatives and attention backward. A physical Android XR case study transfers a Meganeura-trained decoder into an Adreno/OpenXR application sharing the graphics queue. The results show that general consumer graphics APIs can support a compact shared train-to-deploy stack at useful, sometimes vendor-competitive performance. The measured gaps point to kernel coverage, scheduling, and arithmetic policy rather than an identified API limitation.

To match the blooming demand of generative AI workloads, GPU designers have so far been trying to pack more and more compute and memory into single complex and expensive packages. However, there is growing uncertainty about the scalability of individual GPUs and thus AI clusters, as state-of-the-art GPUs are already displaying packaging, yield, and cooling limitations. We propose to rethink the design and scaling of AI clusters through efficiently-connected large clusters of Lite-GPUs, GPUs with single, small dies and a fraction of the capabilities of larger GPUs. We think recent advances in co-packaged optics can be key in overcoming the communication challenges of distributing AI workloads onto more Lite-GPUs. In this paper, we present the key benefits of Lite-GPUs on manufacturing cost, blast radius, yield, and power efficiency; and discuss systems opportunities and challenges around resource, workload, memory, and network management.

Community GPU platforms are emerging as a cost-effective and democratized alternative to centralized GPU clusters for AI workloads, aggregating idle consumer GPUs from globally distributed and heterogeneous environments. However, their extreme hardware/software diversity, volatile availability, and variable network conditions render traditional schedulers ineffective, leading to suboptimal task completion. In this work, we present REACH (Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Allocation in Community and Heterogeneous Networks), a Transformer-based reinforcement learning framework that redefines task scheduling as a sequence scoring problem to balance performance, reliability, cost, and network efficiency. By modeling both global GPU states and task requirements, REACH learns to adaptively co-locate computation with data, prioritize critical jobs, and mitigate the impact of unreliable resources. Extensive simulation results show that REACH improves task completion rates by up to 17%, more than doubles the success rate for high-priority tasks, and reduces bandwidth penalties by over 80% compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Stress tests further demonstrate its robustness to GPU churn and network congestion, while scalability experiments confirm its effectiveness in large-scale, high-contention scenarios.

Serving Large Language Models (LLMs) is a GPU-intensive task where traditional autoscalers fall short, particularly for modern Prefill-Decode (P/D) disaggregated architectures. This architectural shift, while powerful, introduces significant operational challenges, including inefficient use of heterogeneous hardware, network bottlenecks, and critical imbalances between prefill and decode stages. We introduce HeteroScale, a coordinated autoscaling framework that addresses the core challenges of P/D disaggregated serving. HeteroScale combines a topology-aware scheduler that adapts to heterogeneous hardware and network constraints with a novel metric-driven policy derived from the first large-scale empirical study of autoscaling signals in production. By leveraging a single, robust metric to jointly scale prefill and decode pools, HeteroScale maintains architectural balance while ensuring efficient, adaptive resource management. Deployed in a massive production environment on tens of thousands of GPUs, HeteroScale has proven its effectiveness, increasing average GPU utilization by a significant 26.6 percentage points and saving hundreds of thousands of GPU-hours daily, all while upholding stringent service level objectives.

The challenge of mapping AI architectures to GPU hardware is creating a critical bottleneck in AI progress. Despite substantial efforts, hand-written custom kernels fail to meet their theoretical performance thresholds, even on well-established operations like linear attention. The diverse hardware capabilities of GPUs might suggest that we need a wide variety of techniques to achieve high performance. However, our work explores whether a small number of key abstractions can drastically simplify the process. We present ThunderKittens (TK), a framework for writing performant AI kernels while remaining easy to use and maintain. Our abstractions map to the three levels of the GPU hierarchy: (1) at the warp-level, we provide 16x16 matrix tiles as basic data structures and PyTorch-like parallel compute operations over tiles, (2) at the thread-block level, we provide a template for overlapping asynchronous operations across parallel warps, and (3) at the grid-level, we provide support to help hide the block launch and tear-down, and memory costs. We show the value of TK by providing kernels that match or outperform prior kernels for a range of AI operations. We match CuBLAS and FlashAttention-3 on GEMM and attention inference performance and outperform the strongest baselines by 10-40% on attention backwards, 8times on state space models, and 14times on linear attention.

It is now a common business practice to buy access to large language model (LLM) inference rather than self-host, because of significant upfront hardware infrastructure and energy costs. However, as a buyer, there is no mechanism to verify the authenticity of the advertised service including the serving hardware platform, e.g. that it is actually being served using an NVIDIA H100. Furthermore, there are reports suggesting that model providers may deliver models that differ slightly from the advertised ones, often to make them run on less expensive hardware. That way, a client pays premium for a capable model access on more expensive hardware, yet ends up being served by a (potentially less capable) cheaper model on cheaper hardware. In this paper we introduce \textbf{hardware and software platform inference (HSPI)} -- a method for identifying the underlying architecture and software stack of a (black-box) machine learning model solely based on its input-output behavior. Our method leverages the inherent differences of various architectures and compilers to distinguish between different types and software stacks. By analyzing the numerical patterns in the model's outputs, we propose a classification framework capable of accurately identifying the used for model inference as well as the underlying software configuration. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of inferring type from black-box models. We evaluate HSPI against models served on different real hardware and find that in a white-box setting we can distinguish between different s with between 83.9% and 100% accuracy. Even in a black-box setting we are able to achieve results that are up to three times higher than random guess accuracy.

AI agents are emerging as a dominant workload in a wide range of applications, promising to be the vehicle that delivers the promised benefits of AI to enterprises and consumers. Unlike conventional software or static inference, agentic workloads are dynamic and structurally complex. Often these agents are directed graphs of compute and IO operations that span multi-modal data input and conversion), data processing and context gathering (e.g vector DB lookups), multiple LLM inferences, tool calls, etc. To scale AI agent usage, we need efficient and scalable deployment and agent-serving infrastructure. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a system design for dynamic orchestration of AI agent workloads on heterogeneous compute infrastructure spanning CPUs and accelerators, both from different vendors and across different performance tiers within a single vendor. The system delivers several building blocks: a framework for planning and optimizing agentic AI execution graphs using cost models that account for compute, memory, and bandwidth constraints of different HW; a MLIR based representation and compilation system that can decompose AI agent execution graphs into granular operators and generate code for different HW options; and a dynamic orchestration system that can place the granular components across a heterogeneous compute infrastructure and stitch them together while meeting an end-to-end SLA. Our design performs a systems level TCO optimization and preliminary results show that leveraging a heterogeneous infrastructure can deliver significant TCO benefits. A preliminary surprising finding is that for some workloads a heterogeneous combination of older generation GPUs with newer accelerators can deliver similar TCO as the latest generation homogenous GPU infrastructure design, potentially extending the life of deployed infrastructure.

Similarity search finds application in specialized database systems handling complex data such as images or videos, which are typically represented by high-dimensional features and require specific indexing structures. This paper tackles the problem of better utilizing GPUs for this task. While GPUs excel at data-parallel tasks, prior approaches are bottlenecked by algorithms that expose less parallelism, such as k-min selection, or make poor use of the memory hierarchy. We propose a design for k-selection that operates at up to 55% of theoretical peak performance, enabling a nearest neighbor implementation that is 8.5x faster than prior GPU state of the art. We apply it in different similarity search scenarios, by proposing optimized design for brute-force, approximate and compressed-domain search based on product quantization. In all these setups, we outperform the state of the art by large margins. Our implementation enables the construction of a high accuracy k-NN graph on 95 million images from the Yfcc100M dataset in 35 minutes, and of a graph connecting 1 billion vectors in less than 12 hours on 4 Maxwell Titan X GPUs. We have open-sourced our approach for the sake of comparison and reproducibility.

Existing GPU libraries often struggle to fully exploit the parallel resources and on-chip memory (SRAM) of GPUs when chaining multiple GPU functions as individual kernels. While Kernel Fusion (KF) techniques like Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Vertical Fusion (VF) can mitigate this, current library implementations often require library developers to manually create fused kernels. Hence, library users rely on limited sets of pre-compiled or template-based fused kernels. This limits the use cases that can benefit from HF and VF and increases development costs. In order to solve these issues, we present a novel methodology for building GPU libraries that enables automatic on-demand HF and VF for arbitrary combinations of GPU library functions. Our methodology defines reusable, fusionable components that users combine via high-level programming interfaces. Leveraging C++17 metaprogramming features available in compilers like nvcc, our methodology generates a single and optimized fused kernel tailored to the user's specific sequence of operations at compile time, without needing a custom compiler or manual development and pre-compilation of kernel combinations. This approach abstracts low-level GPU complexities while maximizing GPU resource utilization and keeping intermediate data in SRAM. We provide an open-source implementation demonstrating significant speedups compared to traditional libraries in various benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of this methodology for improving GPU performance in the range of 2x to more than 1000x, while preserving high-level programmability.

Analytical framework for predicting General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) performance on modern GPUs, focusing on runtime, power consumption, and energy efficiency. Our study employs two approaches: a custom-implemented tiled matrix multiplication kernel for fundamental analysis, and NVIDIA's CUTLASS library for comprehensive performance data collection across advanced configurations. Using the NVIDIA RTX 4070 as our experimental platform, we developed a Random Forest-based prediction model with multi-output regression capability. Through analysis of both naive tiled matrix multiplication with varying tile sizes (1 to 32) and 16,128 CUTLASS GEMM operations across diverse configurations, we identified critical performance patterns related to matrix dimensions, thread block configurations, and memory access patterns. Our framework achieved exceptional accuracy with an R^2 score of 0.98 for runtime prediction (mean error 15.57%) and 0.78 for power prediction (median error 5.42%). The system successfully predicts performance across matrix sizes, demonstrating robust scaling behavior. Our results show that optimal tile size selection can improve performance by up to 3.2x while reducing power consumption by 22% compared to baseline configurations. Analysis of shared memory utilization and SM occupancy reveals that tile sizes of 16x16 achieve the best balance between parallelism and resource usage. The implementation of our framework, including prediction models and analysis tools, is available as an open-source project at GPPerf [https://github.com/pavlyhalim/GPPerf].

In practical federated learning scenarios, the participating devices may have different bitwidths for computation and memory storage by design. However, despite the progress made in device-heterogeneous federated learning scenarios, the heterogeneity in the bitwidth specifications in the hardware has been mostly overlooked. We introduce a pragmatic FL scenario with bitwidth heterogeneity across the participating devices, dubbed as Bitwidth Heterogeneous Federated Learning (BHFL). BHFL brings in a new challenge, that the aggregation of model parameters with different bitwidths could result in severe performance degeneration, especially for high-bitwidth models. To tackle this problem, we propose ProWD framework, which has a trainable weight dequantizer at the central server that progressively reconstructs the low-bitwidth weights into higher bitwidth weights, and finally into full-precision weights. ProWD further selectively aggregates the model parameters to maximize the compatibility across bit-heterogeneous weights. We validate ProWD against relevant FL baselines on the benchmark datasets, using clients with varying bitwidths. Our ProWD largely outperforms the baseline FL algorithms as well as naive approaches (e.g. grouped averaging) under the proposed BHFL scenario.

Modern large language models (LLMs) increasingly depends on efficient long-context processing and generation mechanisms, including sparse attention, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and compressed contextual memory, to support complex reasoning. We show that these optimizations can be unified into a four-step memory processing pipeline: Prepare Memory, Compute Relevancy, Retrieval, and Apply to Inference. Through systematic profiling, we identify a 22%-97% memory processing overhead in LLM inference and strong heterogeneity in its computational characteristics. Motivated by this insight, we argue that heterogeneous systems are well-suited to accelerate memory processing and thus end-to-end inference. We demonstrate this approach on a GPU-FPGA system by offloading sparse, irregular, and memory-bounded operations to FPGAs while retaining compute-intensive operations on GPUs. Evaluated on an AMD MI210 GPU and an Alveo U55C FPGA, our system is 1.04sim2.2times faster and requires 1.11sim4.7times less energy across multiple LLM inference optimizations than the GPU baseline (similar results hold on NVIDIA A100). These results establish heterogeneous systems as a practical direction for efficient LLM memory processing and inform future heterogeneous hardware design.

Explicit graphics APIs expose memory dependencies, per-resource accesses, and image layouts. wgpu reconstructs and validates this state; Blade keeps Vulkan images in GENERAL, tracks no per-resource state, and issues global pass-boundary barriers. We isolate barrier placement and stage/access scope within Blade, compare matched wgpu programs end-to-end, and measure six GPUs from four vendors, including exploratory Apple/Metal results. Removing fifteen redundant barriers from sixteen independent compute passes reduces GPU span by 29.3% on an RTX 5070 and 32.3% on an RX 7900 XT. It reduces independent-render span by 32.4% and 7.3% on the same discrete parts, but increases Radeon 780M span by 42.4% at 32 passes, beyond a 12.3% count-specific stability floor. No dependent-chain placement effect clears the study's cell-specific stability criterion. Deriving global barrier scope from the pass kinds around each boundary, without tracking any resource, saves 5.0% on an NVIDIA graphics chain and 6.7% on an AMD compute chain; no AMD render-involving scope cell resolves. wgpu's record-and-submit cost is higher in every measured cell, but this end-to-end difference cannot be attributed to tracking alone. RADV source shows why command counts do not predict these costs: broad global dependencies expand to several flush and invalidate requests that the driver may partly elide. It also shows that persistent GENERAL retains DCC under the measured RDNA conditions but disables FMASK. The resulting Blade direction is lightweight aggregate pass-kind state in a tracking-free RHI: an upstream render graph selects global dependency cuts, while aliasing, cross-queue use, exceptional layouts, and arbitrary per-resource DAG edges remain resource-aware engine responsibilities.

Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating GPU Kernels. Current benchmarks focus on the translation of high-level languages into CUDA, overlooking the more general and challenging task of text-to-CUDA generation. Furthermore, given the hardware-specific and performance-critical features of GPU programming, accurately assessing the performance of LLM-generated GPU programs is nontrivial. In this work, we introduce CUDABench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the text-to-CUDA capabilities of LLMs. First, we construct CUDABench-Set, which covers Breadth-Depth-Difficulty evaluation space in diverse application domains, including artificial intelligence, scientific computing, and data analytics, etc. Furthermore, we propose CUDABench-Score and Generative Verification Pipeline that assess (1) compilation correctness, (2) functional consistency through execution-based verification, and (3) a novel roofline-based metric, Performance-Score. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs reveals insightful findings and challenges of text-to-CUDA, such as a notable mismatch between high compilation success rates and low functional correctness, a lack of domain-specific algorithmic knowledge, and suboptimal utilization of GPU hardware resources. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/CUDA-Bench/CUDABench.

W4A4 quantization promises full utilization of INT4 Tensor Cores, yet group dequantization overhead on CUDA Cores has driven existing systems to mixed-precision fallbacks. We present the first systematic study of how intra-SM compute balance governs this bottleneck. Through controlled benchmarks across four GPUs from Ampere and Ada architectures, we identify the Tensor Cores to CUDA Cores throughput ratio (ρ) as the primary hardware indicator: the W4A4-g128 kernel yields 2.0--2.5times speedup on RTX~3090 (ρ=16) yet degrades to 0.43--0.47times on A100 (ρ=64) in compute-bond scenarios, establishing W4A4 viability as platform-dependent rather than universally infeasible. Guided by this finding, we build APEX4, which co-designs pure INT4 GEMM kernels with ρ-aware granularity adaptation to mitigate the CUDA Cores dequantization bottleneck. APEX4 achieves perplexity within 0.63 of FP16 on LLaMA-2-70B and outperforms W4Ax Atom-g128 by 4.0\%--4.4\% in zero-shot accuracy. Deployed as a drop-in replacement in unmodified vLLM, it delivers up to 1.66times end-to-end speedup on L40S (ρ=8), and 1.78times on RTX~3090 (ρ=16), 2.09times on A40 (ρ=16), while recovering A100 (ρ=64) to 1.20--1.40times via the mixed-granularity mode. Our code is available at https://github.com/APEX4-W4A4/APEX4-W4A4.

Acceleration of graph applications on GPUs has found large interest due to the ubiquitous use of graph processing in various domains. The inherent irregularity in graph applications leads to several challenges for parallelization. A key challenge, which we address in this paper, is that of load-imbalance. If the work-assignment to threads uses node-based graph partitioning, it can result in skewed task-distribution, leading to poor load-balance. In contrast, if the work-assignment uses edge-based graph partitioning, the load-balancing is better, but the memory requirement is relatively higher. This makes it unsuitable for large graphs. In this work, we propose three techniques for improved load-balancing of graph applications on GPUs. Each technique brings in unique advantages, and a user may have to employ a specific technique based on the requirement. Using Breadth First Search and Single Source Shortest Paths as our processing kernels, we illustrate the effectiveness of each of the proposed techniques in comparison to the existing node-based and edge-based mechanisms.

We present a single-GPU (H100, bf16) evaluation of GPT-OSS-20B (Mixture-of-Experts; 20.9B total, approx. 3.61B active) against dense baselines Qwen3-32B and Yi-34B across multiple dimensions. We measure true time-to-first-token (TTFT), full-decode throughput (TPOT), end-to-end latency percentiles, peak VRAM with past key values (PKV) held, and energy via a consistent nvidia-smi-based sampler. At a 2048-token context with 64-token decode, GPT-OSS-20B delivers higher decode throughput and tokens per Joule than dense baselines Qwen3-32B and Yi-34B, while substantially reducing peak VRAM and energy per 1000 generated tokens; its TTFT is higher due to MoE routing overhead. With only 17.3% of parameters active (3.61B of 20.9B), GPT-OSS-20B provides about 31.8% higher decode throughput and 25.8% lower energy per 1000 generated tokens than Qwen3-32B at 2048/64, while using 31.7% less peak VRAM. Normalized by active parameters, GPT-OSS-20B shows markedly stronger per-active-parameter efficiency (APE), underscoring MoE's deployment advantages. We do not evaluate accuracy; this is a deployment-focused study. We release code and consolidated results to enable replication and extension.

Training large language models (LLMs) is known to be challenging because of the huge computational and memory capacity requirements. To address these issues, it is common to use a cluster of GPUs with 3D parallelism, which splits a model along the data batch, pipeline stage, and intra-layer tensor dimensions. However, the use of 3D parallelism produces the additional challenge of finding the optimal number of ways on each dimension and mapping the split models onto the GPUs. Several previous studies have attempted to automatically find the optimal configuration, but many of these lacked several important aspects. For instance, the heterogeneous nature of the interconnect speeds is often ignored. While the peak bandwidths for the interconnects are usually made equal, the actual attained bandwidth varies per link in real-world clusters. Combined with the critical path modeling that does not properly consider the communication, they easily fall into sub-optimal configurations. In addition, they often fail to consider the memory requirement per GPU, often recommending solutions that could not be executed. To address these challenges, we propose Pipette, which is an automatic fine-grained LLM training configurator for real-world clusters. By devising better performance models along with the memory estimator and fine-grained individual GPU assignment, Pipette achieves faster configurations that satisfy the memory constraints. We evaluated Pipette on large clusters to show that it provides a significant speedup over the prior art. The implementation of Pipette is available at https://github.com/yimjinkyu1/date2024_pipette.

Diffusion models have achieved great success in synthesizing high-quality images. However, generating high-resolution images with diffusion models is still challenging due to the enormous computational costs, resulting in a prohibitive latency for interactive applications. In this paper, we propose DistriFusion to tackle this problem by leveraging parallelism across multiple GPUs. Our method splits the model input into multiple patches and assigns each patch to a GPU. However, na\"{\i}vely implementing such an algorithm breaks the interaction between patches and loses fidelity, while incorporating such an interaction will incur tremendous communication overhead. To overcome this dilemma, we observe the high similarity between the input from adjacent diffusion steps and propose displaced patch parallelism, which takes advantage of the sequential nature of the diffusion process by reusing the pre-computed feature maps from the previous timestep to provide context for the current step. Therefore, our method supports asynchronous communication, which can be pipelined by computation. Extensive experiments show that our method can be applied to recent Stable Diffusion XL with no quality degradation and achieve up to a 6.1times speedup on eight NVIDIA A100s compared to one. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/distrifuser.

GPUs are the most popular platform for accelerating HPC workloads, such as artificial intelligence and science simulations. However, most microarchitectural research in academia relies on GPU core pipeline designs based on architectures that are more than 15 years old. This paper reverse engineers modern NVIDIA GPU cores, unveiling many key aspects of its design and explaining how GPUs leverage hardware-compiler techniques where the compiler guides hardware during execution. In particular, it reveals how the issue logic works including the policy of the issue scheduler, the structure of the register file and its associated cache, and multiple features of the memory pipeline. Moreover, it analyses how a simple instruction prefetcher based on a stream buffer fits well with modern NVIDIA GPUs and is likely to be used. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the register file cache and the number of register file read ports on both simulation accuracy and performance. By modeling all these new discovered microarchitectural details, we achieve 18.24% lower mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in execution cycles than previous state-of-the-art simulators, resulting in an average of 13.98% MAPE with respect to real hardware (NVIDIA RTX A6000). Also, we demonstrate that this new model stands for other NVIDIA architectures, such as Turing. Finally, we show that the software-based dependence management mechanism included in modern NVIDIA GPUs outperforms a hardware mechanism based on scoreboards in terms of performance and area.

GPU kernels are critical for ML performance but difficult to optimize across diverse accelerators. We present KForge, a platform-agnostic framework built on two collaborative LLM-based agents: a generation agent that produces and iteratively refines programs through compilation and correctness feedback, and a performance analysis agent that interprets profiling data to guide optimization. This agent-based architecture requires only a single-shot example to target new platforms. We make three key contributions: (1) introducing an iterative refinement system where the generation agent and performance analysis agent collaborate through functional and optimization passes, interpreting diverse profiling data (from programmatic APIs to GUI-based tools) to generate actionable recommendations that guide program synthesis for arbitrary accelerators; (2) demonstrating that the generation agent effectively leverages cross-platform knowledge transfer, where a reference implementation from one architecture substantially improves generation quality for different hardware targets; and (3) validating the platform-agnostic nature of our approach by demonstrating effective program synthesis across fundamentally different parallel computing platforms: NVIDIA CUDA and Apple Metal.

MPI derived datatypes are an abstraction that simplifies handling of non-contiguous data in MPI applications. These datatypes are recursively constructed at runtime from primitive Named Types defined in the MPI standard. More recently, the development and deployment of CUDA-aware MPI implementations has encouraged the transition of distributed high-performance MPI codes to use GPUs. Such implementations allow MPI functions to directly operate on GPU buffers, easing integration of GPU compute into MPI codes. This work first presents a novel datatype handling strategy for nested strided datatypes, which finds a middle ground between the specialized or generic handling in prior work. This work also shows that the performance characteristics of non-contiguous data handling can be modeled with empirical system measurements, and used to transparently improve MPI_Send/Recv latency. Finally, despite substantial attention to non-contiguous GPU data and CUDA-aware MPI implementations, good performance cannot be taken for granted. This work demonstrates its contributions through an MPI interposer library, TEMPI. TEMPI can be used with existing MPI deployments without system or application changes. Ultimately, the interposed-library model of this work demonstrates MPI_Pack speedup of up to 242000x and MPI_Send speedup of up to 59000x compared to the MPI implementation deployed on a leadership-class supercomputer. This yields speedup of more than 917x in a 3D halo exchange with 3072 processes.

We pair each GPU kernel's static PTX metrics (registers, spills, instruction count) with CUDA-event-timed runtime on five GPU classes: RTX 3060, A10, L40S, A100 SXM4, and H100 NVL. In this corpus and toolchain the static and measured signals separate cleanly along one axis. Per-pair Delta-regs and Delta-instrs are identical across all five GPUs for any given (correct, buggy) pair. Measured Delta-perf% is not. Structural bugs that change the kernel's work are unambiguous in the static signal. The gelu_triton_buggy variant, which drops a leading 0.5 factor, removes 8 instructions and 8 registers. The corresponding measured Delta-perf% on RTX 3060 is +3.2%, within the run-to-run noise band at the sub-millisecond scale these corpus kernels occupy. Semantic bugs that swap one constant for another are invisible to the static signal. The softmax_triton_buggy variant, which substitutes other=0.0 for -inf on the masked load, compiles to byte-identical PTX. The paper's bounded claim is that, for this corpus and toolchain, a static-PTX delta gate is a portable pre-filter that separates structural from semantic changes; measured runtime deltas at this scale are hardware- and noise-sensitive and are not a substitute.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model architecture has emerged as a promising solution for scaling transformer models efficiently, offering sparse activation that reduces computational costs while increasing model capacity. However, as MoE models scale, they need to be distributed across GPU devices, thus face critical performance bottlenecks due to their large memory footprint. Expert parallelism distributes experts across GPUs, however, faces key challenges including an unbalanced token routing and expert activation, resulting in communication tail latency and processing inefficiencies. While existing solutions address some of these issues, they fail to resolve the dual challenges of load imbalance and communication skew. The imbalance in token processing load across experts causes uneven processing times on different GPUs, while communication skew between GPUs leads to unbalanced inter-GPU data transfers. These factors degrade the performance of MoE models by increasing tail latency and reducing overall throughput. To address these limitations, we propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to optimize expert placement by jointly considering token load, communication, and computation costs. We exploit the property that there is a token routing dependency across layers, where tokens routed to a specific expert in one layer are likely to be routed to a limited set of experts in the subsequent layer. Our solution, MoETuner, offers an optimal expert-to-GPU assignment that minimizes inter-GPU token routing costs and balances token processing across devices, thereby reducing tail latency and end-to-end execution time. Experimental results demonstrate 9.3% and 17.5% of end-to-end speedups for single-node and multi-node inference respectively, showcasing the potential of our ILP-based optimization for offering expert parallel solutions for next-generation MoEs.

Optimizing GPU kernels presents a significantly greater challenge for large language models (LLMs) than standard code generation tasks, as it requires understanding hardware architecture, parallel optimization strategies, and performance profiling outputs. Most existing LLM-based approaches to kernel generation rely on simple prompting and feedback loops, incorporating hardware awareness only indirectly through profiling feedback. We introduce KernelFoundry, an evolutionary framework that efficiently explores the GPU kernel design space through three key mechanisms: (1) MAP-Elites quality-diversity search with kernel-specific behavioral dimensions to sustain exploration across diverse optimization strategies; (2) meta-prompt evolution, which co-evolves prompts with kernels to uncover task-specific optimization strategies, and (3) template-based parameter optimization to tune kernels to inputs and hardware. We evaluate this framework on KernelBench, robust-kbench, and custom tasks, generating SYCL kernels as a cross-platform GPU programming model and CUDA kernels for comparison to prior work. Our approach consistently outperforms the baseline methods, achieving an average speedup of 2.3x on KernelBench for SYCL. Moreover, KernelFoundry is implemented as a distributed framework with remote access to diverse hardware, enabling rapid benchmarking and featuring a flexible user input layer that supports kernel generation for a wide range of real-world use cases beyond benchmarking.

Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption. Optimizing these deployments requires matching specific LLMs to the most efficient GPUs, but operators currently lack the tools to do so without exhaustively profiling each combination. While some predictive models exist, they still require profiling data and struggle to generalize to hardware unseen during training. To address this, we introduce WattGPU, featuring two predictive models for mean GPU power draw and Inter-Token Latency (ITL). Our approach leverages only publicly available LLM metadata and GPU specifications, eliminating the need for hardware access or profiling while enabling generalization to unseen NVIDIA server-grade GPUs and LLMs. We evaluate our models using rigorous leave-one-GPU-out and leave-one-LLM-out cross-validation on a dataset of 42 open-source LLMs (0.1B--27B parameters) and 8 GPUs under both offline and server scenarios. The mean power draw model achieves a median absolute percentage error of leq3.4% for offline and leq13.5% for server scenarios on unseen GPUs, while the latency model achieves leq8.5% in server mode, both maintaining strong GPU ranking correlations for server scenarios (Kendall τgeq0.76). Compared to standard physically grounded baselines -- Load-Scaled Thermal Design Power (TDP) for power draw and roofline for latency -- our models reduce median absolute percentage error by approximately 4times on unseen LLM-GPU combinations for server scenarios or approximately 2times for completely unseen GPUs. WattGPU's data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/maufadel/wattgpu.

We present Onesweep, a least-significant digit (LSD) radix sorting algorithm for large GPU sorting problems residing in global memory. Our parallel algorithm employs a method of single-pass prefix sum that only requires ~2n global read/write operations for each digit-binning iteration. This exhibits a significant reduction in last-level memory traffic versus contemporary GPU radix sorting implementations, where each iteration of digit binning requires two passes through the dataset totaling ~3n global memory operations. On the NVIDIA A100 GPU, our approach achieves 29.4 GKey/s when sorting 256M random 32-bit keys. Compared to CUB, the current state-of-the-art GPU LSD radix sort, our approach provides a speedup of ~1.5x. For 32-bit keys with varied distributions, our approach provides more consistent performance compared to HRS, the current state-of-the-art GPU MSD radix sort, and outperforms it in almost all cases.

As giant dense models advance quality but require large amounts of GPU budgets for training, the sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), a kind of conditional computation architecture, is proposed to scale models while keeping their computation constant. Specifically, the input tokens are routed by the gate network and only activates part of the expert network. Existing MoE training systems only support part of mainstream MoE models (e.g. Top k) training under expensive high-bandwidth GPU clusters. In this paper, we present HetuMoE, a high-performance large-scale sparse MoE training system built on Hetu. HetuMoE provides multiple gating strategies and efficient GPU kernel implementations. To further improve the training efficiency on commodity GPU clusters (e.g, with only 1 NiC), we introduce the hierarchical AllToAll communication that combines hierarchical networks and aggregating messages. Compared with existing state-of-the-art MoE systems, HetuMoE obtains at least 15% speedup. Specifically, HetuMoE outperforms DeepSpeed-MoE up to 8.1x under the switch gate with a batch size of 32. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/Hetu.

GPU Confidential Computing (GPU-CC) now preserves GPU-local performance: on NVIDIA B300, BF16 matmul runs at 0.998x of non-confidential performance. Yet LLM serving under Intel TDX plus GPU-CC still loses 13-27% of throughput, and KV-cache restore latency can more than double. This paper studies that gap on two Blackwell platforms, RTX Pro 6000 and B300 HGX, and identifies its dominant cause: the confidential VM-GPU bridge, not GPU compute. We find that GPU-CC turns host/device movement into a serialized, high-setup-cost channel. Secure copies do not gain CUDA-stream concurrency within a context, asynchronous transfers block at the runtime boundary, and small crossings pay a fixed toll. This violates the assumptions of modern inference runtimes, where DMA is expected to be cheap, concurrent, and asynchronous. In vLLM dense decode, the gap closes around 44x-slower small alloc-and-copy operations; targeted patches reject alternative explanations. A scheduling flag recovers 57% of the gap, while a worker-thread drain recovers up to 92% in qualified high-concurrency runs. The same bridge model explains a +131% KV-restore penalty and a 34x model-load slowdown. Blackwell also changes the confidential tenancy unit. We qualify confidential multi-GPU NVSwitch tenants on B300, including 510 GB/s NVLink P2P inside a CVM and concurrent isolated tenants, and identify the remaining fabric-attestation gap for production confidential AI platforms.

Scaling Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training introduces systems challenges absent in dense models. Because each token activates only a subset of experts, this sparsity allows total parameters to grow much faster than per-token computation, creating coupled constraints across memory, communication, and computation. Optimizing one dimension often shifts pressure to another, demanding co-design across the full system stack. We address these challenges for MoE training through integrated optimizations spanning memory (fine-grained recomputation, offloading, etc.), communication (optimized dispatchers, overlapping, etc.), and computation (Grouped GEMM, fusions, CUDA Graphs, etc.). The framework also provides Parallel Folding for flexible multi-dimensional parallelism, low-precision training support for FP8 and NVFP4, and efficient long-context training. On NVIDIA GB300 and GB200, it achieves 1,233/1,048 TFLOPS/GPU for DeepSeek-V3-685B and 974/919 TFLOPS/GPU for Qwen3-235B. As a performant, scalable, and production-ready open-source solution, it has been used across academia and industry for training MoE models ranging from billions to trillions of parameters on clusters scaling up to thousands of GPUs. This report explains how these techniques work, their trade-offs, and their interactions at the systems level, providing practical guidance for scaling MoE models with Megatron Core.

Over the past year, the vLLM Semantic Router project has released a series of work spanning: (1) core routing mechanisms -- signal-driven routing, context-length pool routing, router performance engineering, policy conflict detection, low-latency embedding models, category-aware semantic caching, user-feedback-driven routing adaptation, hallucination detection, and hierarchical content-safety classification for privacy and jailbreak protection; (2) fleet optimization -- fleet provisioning and energy-efficiency analysis; (3) agentic and multimodal routing -- multimodal agent routing, tool selection, CUA security, and multi-turn context memory and safety; (4) governance and standards -- inference routing protocols and multi-provider API extensions. Each paper tackled a specific problem in LLM inference, but the problems are not independent; for example, fleet provisioning depends on the routing policy, which depends on the workload mix, shifting as organizations adopt agentic and multimodal workloads. This paper distills those results into the Workload-Router-Pool (WRP) architecture, a three-dimensional framework for LLM inference optimization. Workload characterizes what the fleet serves (chat vs. agent, single-turn vs. multi-turn, warm vs. cold, prefill-heavy vs. decode-heavy). Router determines how each request is dispatched (static semantic rules, online bandit adaptation, RL-based model selection, quality-aware cascading). Pool defines where inference runs (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous GPU, disaggregated prefill/decode, KV-cache topology). We map our prior work onto a 3x3 WRP interaction matrix, identify which cells we have covered and which remain open, and propose twenty-one concrete research directions at the intersections, each grounded in our prior measurements, tiered by maturity from engineering-ready to open research.

Large language model (LLM)-based inference workloads increasingly dominate data center costs and resource utilization. Therefore, understanding the inference workload characteristics on evolving CPU-GPU coupled architectures is crucial for optimization. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of LLM inference behavior on loosely-coupled (PCIe A100/H100) and closely-coupled (GH200) systems. We analyze performance dynamics using fine-grained operator-to-kernel trace analysis, facilitated by our novel profiler SKIP and metrics like Total Kernel Launch and Queuing Time (TKLQT). Results show that closely-coupled (CC) GH200 significantly outperforms loosely-coupled (LC) systems at large batch sizes, achieving 1.9x-2.7x faster prefill latency for Llama 3.2-1B. However, our analysis also reveals that GH200 remains CPU-bound up to 4x larger batch sizes than LC systems. In this extended CPU-bound region, we identify the performance characteristics of the Grace CPU as a key factor contributing to higher inference latency at low batch sizes on GH200. We demonstrate that TKLQT accurately identifies this CPU/GPU-bound transition point. Based on this analysis, we further show that kernel fusion offers significant potential to mitigate GH200's low-batch latency bottleneck by reducing kernel launch overhead. This detailed kernel-level characterization provides critical insights for optimizing diverse CPU-GPU coupling strategies. This work is an initial effort, and we plan to explore other major AI/DL workloads that demand different degrees of CPU-GPU heterogeneous architectures.

In the last three years, the largest dense deep learning models have grown over 1000x to reach hundreds of billions of parameters, while the GPU memory has only grown by 5x (16 GB to 80 GB). Therefore, the growth in model scale has been supported primarily though system innovations that allow large models to fit in the aggregate GPU memory of multiple GPUs. However, we are getting close to the GPU memory wall. It requires 800 NVIDIA V100 GPUs just to fit a trillion parameter model for training, and such clusters are simply out of reach for most data scientists. In addition, training models at that scale requires complex combinations of parallelism techniques that puts a big burden on the data scientists to refactor their model. In this paper we present ZeRO-Infinity, a novel heterogeneous system technology that leverages GPU, CPU, and NVMe memory to allow for unprecedented model scale on limited resources without requiring model code refactoring. At the same time it achieves excellent training throughput and scalability, unencumbered by the limited CPU or NVMe bandwidth. ZeRO-Infinity can fit models with tens and even hundreds of trillions of parameters for training on current generation GPU clusters. It can be used to fine-tune trillion parameter models on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 node, making large models more accessible. In terms of training throughput and scalability, it sustains over 25 petaflops on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs(40% of peak), while also demonstrating super linear scalability. An open source implementation of ZeRO-Infinity is available through DeepSpeed, a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.

Existing GPU kernel generation benchmarks draw problems from synthetic or curated sources that diverge from deployed workloads. We present Atrex-Bench, a benchmark whose 30 operators and 440 shapes are sampled directly from full-cluster production inference traces of compute-limited, memory-rich GPUs. Each problem carries an importance weight derived from its share of observed GPU time, weighted by application card-hours and computed separately for the serving phases in which it runs, together with a per-problem roofline ceiling, so the aggregate score emphasizes the kernels that consume the most serving time. Evaluating six frontier coding agents on Atrex-Bench shows that even the best vanilla model reaches only {sim}10% of the hardware roofline on production operators; and correctness alone overstates capability, since much of the apparent pass rate comes from PyTorch fallbacks rather than kernels the model wrote. To close this gap, we co-release Atrex-Kernel-Agent (AKA), a profile-driven kernel-optimization agent that combines iterative measure-revise search, optimization dropout for escaping stalled search contexts, and a layered GPU-optimization knowledge base (298 reference-kernel files and 244 optimization-knowledge documents, plus external upstream reference projects for API/ISA lookup). In a controlled case study, the agent converts zero-FlyDSL fallbacks into real kernels that match or exceed hand-tuned production baselines.

Simulation-based RL for contemporary robot control is increasingly organized around GPU-resident simulation: physics, rollout collection, and learning are placed on a single GPU-centric execution path. This paradigm has greatly improved training speed, but it has also encouraged a default assumption that efficient training requires physics to reside on the GPU. We revisit this assumption. Our view is that, in simulation-dominated robot control, the essential question is not which processor runs physics, but whether simulation throughput, policy learning, and runtime synchronization form an efficient end-to-end loop. We present UniLab, a heterogeneous CPU-simulation / GPU-learning architecture that decouples CPU-parallel simulation from GPU policy updates through a unified runtime for data movement, buffering, and synchronization. UniLab is implemented as a complete and extensible training system using MuJoCoUni and MotrixSim CPU-batched physics backends, supporting PPO, FastSAC, FlashSAC, and APPO. On representative simulation-based robot control tasks, UniLab improves end-to-end training efficiency by 3--10times under the same hardware configuration, while reducing dependence on the NVIDIA CUDA-based software stack and supporting cross-platform execution on the Apple macOS platform and the AMD ROCm and Intel XPU accelerator backends. These results show that GPU simulation is an effective path to efficient training, but not a necessary one, broadening the practical system choices available for robot RL training. Project page: https://unilabsim.github.io.

LLM-agent services repeatedly execute small deterministic transitions between model and tool calls: route an outcome, update state, and emit the next effect. We ask when this control path exposes enough concurrent work for GPU execution, and what changes when a GPU-computed route decision remains on device. We formalize the ready-cohort boundary using fixed-partition share F, exact offline share P*, local upper bound U, and online achieved share A. Under zero service time, unlimited capacity, and equal relative launch deadlines, a specialized dynamic program computes P* exactly. In a stationary Poisson replay of one pinned 851-session public trace panel, the primary condition at 100,000 target active sessions, K=256, and a 50 ms launch deadline gives F=30.19%, P*=43.00%, and U=45.85%. Exact packing recovers 81.83% of the opportunity lost at fixed window boundaries. The outcome-derived route key is a conditioning proxy, not proof of executable identity. A separate mechanism study keeps a GPU-computed binary decision on device instead of returning four bytes to the host and redispatching. Across four named GPU placements, the device-resident path is faster in all 36 configurations; within-placement row-median ratios range from 1.19x to 2.39x. Across both admissible mechanisms, all 14,557,440 tested batched invocations match a separately implemented host oracle. A fixed nested device graph that removes no host decision is slower in all 60 configurations across five placements. Together, the studies establish two measurable gates for GPU agent control: deadline-feasible cohort supply and observation placement. A joined finite online runtime is required to measure A, CPU displacement, and service-level benefit.

Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) extends LoRA by decoupling weight magnitude from direction, but its forward pass requires the row-wise norm of W + sBA, a computation that every major framework we surveyed implements by materializing the dense [d_out, d_in] product BA. At d_in = 8192 and rank r = 384, a single module's norm requires about 512 MB of transient working memory in bf16, making high-rank DoRA costly and often infeasible on common single-GPU setups once hundreds of adapted modules and checkpointing are involved. We present two systems contributions. A factored norm decomposes the squared norm into base, cross, and Gram terms computable through O(d_out r + r^2) intermediates, eliminating the dense product. Fused Triton kernels collapse the four-kernel DoRA composition into a single pass, reducing memory traffic by about 4x and using a numerically stable form that avoids catastrophic cancellation in the near-unity rescaling regime where magnitude scales concentrate in practice. Across six 8-32B vision-language models (VLMs) on three NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200) at r = 384 in bf16, the fused implementation is 1.5-2.0x faster than Hugging Face PEFT's DoRA implementation for inference and 1.5-1.9x faster for gradient computation (optimizer step excluded), with up to 7 GB lower peak VRAM. Microbenchmarks on six GPUs spanning four architecture generations (L40S, A100, RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200, B300) confirm 1.5-2.7x compose-kernel speedup. Final-logit cosine similarity exceeds 0.9999 across all model/GPU pairs, and multi-seed training curves match within 7.1 x 10^-4 mean per-step loss delta over 2000 steps.

Heterogeneous CPU-GPU workloads are increasingly used in safety-critical embedded systems, yet no existing approach provides joint attestation of their execution. Prior Control-Flow Attestation (CFA) techniques focus on CPU-side CFA, while GPU attestation is limited to static, load-time verification and does not provide runtime guarantees. As a result, runtime attacks on GPU kernels and violations of the CPU-GPU interaction contract remain unaddressed. We present WarpGuard, the first composite CFA framework for heterogeneous CPU-GPU workloads. WarpGuard verifies execution against a unified control-flow graph (CFG) that captures both CPU and GPU components. It extends prior CFA techniques in two ways: it enables runtime CFA of GPU kernels by tracing their execution against kernel-specific CFGs, and it monitors kernel launch events and enforces per-call site policies to detect violations at the CPU-GPU boundary. These extensions address challenges arising from GPU parallelism and cross-device interactions. We implement WarpGuard using software-based instrumentation, requiring no specialized hardware or binary modifications. Our evaluation on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano shows that WarpGuard detects GPU-side control-flow and cross-boundary attacks. Across microbenchmarks, SPECAccel, and eight TensorRT inference workloads, WarpGuard incurs moderate overheads, suggesting practicality for embedded safety-critical settings.

The field of plasma physics heavily relies on simulations to model various phenomena, such as instabilities, turbulence, and nonlinear behaviors that would otherwise be difficult to study from a purely theoretical approach. Simulations are fundamental in accurately setting up experiments, which can be extremely costly and complex. As high-fidelity tools, gyrokinetic simulations play a crucial role in discovering new physics, interpreting experimental results, and improving the design of next-generation devices. However, their high computational costs necessitate the use of acceleration platforms to reduce execution time. This work revolves around the TRIangular MEsh based Gyrokinetic (TRIMEG) code, which performs high-accuracy particle-in-cell plasma simulations in tokamak geometries, leveraging a novel finite element approach. The rise of graphical processing units (GPUs) constitutes an occasion to satisfy such computational needs, by offloading the most expensive portion of the code to the accelerators. The chosen approach features GPU offloading with the OpenMP API, which grants portability of the code to different architectures, namely AMD and NVIDIA. The particle pushing as well as the grid-to-particle operations have been ported to GPU platforms. Compiler limitations had to be overcome, and portions of the code were restructured to be suitable for GPU acceleration. Kernel performance was evaluated by carrying out GPU grid size exploration, as well as scalability studies. In addition, the efficiency of hybrid MPI-OpenMP offloading parallelization was assessed. The speedup of the GPU implementation was calculated by comparing it with the pure CPU version using different rationales. The Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) mode was simulated using the GPU-accelerated version, and its correctness was verified in terms of the energy growth rate and the two-dimensional mode structures.

Heterogeneous LLM serving stacks split scheduling into two layers that optimize in isolation: model routers pick a model from quality and cost signals while ignoring instance load, and serving load balancers optimize queues while ignoring quality. We present RouteBalance, a serving-aware scheduling layer that fuses both into a single online assignment over concrete model instances, jointly trading off quality, latency, and cost. A batched in-process predictor stack and dead-reckoned instance state keep the joint decision cheap on the request hot path (approx32 ms at 12 req/s). On a 13-instance, 28-GPU heterogeneous cluster serving four model sizes, a single deployed RouteBalance stack traces the upper region of the three-way quality-cost-throughput frontier. Sweeping one weight vector reaches both the highest routing-decision quality (DeepEval 0.419, +0.013 over the strongest baseline, 95% CI [{+}0.005,{+}0.022]; the ordering holds when a second judge re-scores the actually served text) and, at its cost-priority corner, per-request cost that ties the cheapest baseline. With router engineering equalized against concurrent-scoring baseline variants we build, its balanced preset serves at 2.8 s and 30 req/s, leading 2.6 to 4.1times ahead of enhanced BEST-Route at high load. (Deploying those routers as published, one serial scoring call per request, makes them collapse 23times under load, a deployment-architecture effect we isolate separately, not the routing result.) A four-arm isolation shows the benefit follows from pricing latency at model-selection time; the learned predictors contribute calibration and SLO headroom rather than the headline frontier. Code: https://github.com/AKafakA/route-balance

Modern GPUs feature specialized hardware units that enable high-performance, asynchronous dataflow execution. However, the conventional SIMT programming model is fundamentally misaligned with this task-parallel hardware, creating a significant programmability gap. While hardware-level warp specialization is the key to unlocking peak performance, it forces developers to manually orchestrate complex, low-level communication and software pipelines--a process that is labor-intensive, error-prone, and unsustainable. To address this challenge, we present Tawa, an automated compiler that systematically generates high-performance, warp-specialized code from a high-level, tile-based program. Central to our approach is a novel IR abstraction, asynchronous references (aref), which expresses warp-level communication without exposing low-level hardware details. Using this abstraction, Tawa automatically partitions programs into producer-consumer roles and manages the intricate dataflow pipeline, relieving developers of invasive kernel rewriting. Evaluation on NVIDIA H100 GPUs across representative LLM kernels shows that Tawa delivers high hardware utilization, achieving up to 1.1times speedup over highly optimized cuBLAS GEMM kernels. For attention workloads, Tawa attains 1.2times speedup over Triton and matches the performance of the hand-optimized CUTLASS C++ FlashAttention-3 kernel with far less programming effort.

Modern GPUs devote an increasing silicon budget to low-precision matrix-multiplication units, widening the precision-throughput gap for scientific computing workloads. Ozaki Schemes I and II offer an alternative by reconstructing high-precision general matrix multiplication (GEMM) from low-precision operations, yet existing implementations leave substantial performance untapped. In particular, intermediate results are repeatedly materialized in global memory, making data movement the dominant bottleneck. We present EmuGEMM, fused integer Tensor Core kernels for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs that eliminate redundant memory round-trips in both Ozaki schemes. Using Scheme I, EmuGEMM sustains up to 1,639 Top/s on Hopper (83% of INT8 peak) and 3,654 Top/s on Blackwell (81%). For large matrices, EmuGEMM surpasses cuBLAS TF32 throughput by up to 1.4x on Hopper and 1.7x on Blackwell, at comparable accuracy. Using Scheme II, EmuGEMM extends to complex arithmetic and outperforms cuBLAS ZGEMM by up to 2.3x on Hopper and 5.5x on Blackwell.

Exponential increases in scientific experimental data are outstripping the rate of progress in silicon technology. As a result, heterogeneous combinations of architectures and process or device technologies are increasingly important to meet the computing demands of future scientific experiments. However, the complexity of heterogeneous computing systems requires systematic modeling to understand performance. We present a model which addresses this need by framing key aspects of data collection pipelines and constraints, and combines them with the important vectors of technology that shape alternatives, computing metrics that allow complex alternatives to be compared. For instance, a data collection pipeline may be characterized by parameters such as sensor sampling rates, amount of data collected, and the overall relevancy of retrieved samples. Alternatives to this pipeline are enabled by hardware development vectors including advancing CMOS, GPUs, neuromorphic computing, and edge computing. By calculating metrics for each alternative such as overall F1 score, power, hardware cost, and energy expended per relevant sample, this model allows alternate data collection systems to be rigorously compared. To demonstrate this model's capability, we apply it to the CMS experiment (and planned HL-LHC upgrade) to evaluate and compare the application of novel technologies in the data acquisition system (DAQ). We demonstrate that improvements to early stages in the DAQ are highly beneficial, greatly reducing the resources required at later stages of processing (such as a 60% power reduction) and increasing the amount of relevant data retrieved from the experiment per unit power (improving from 0.065 to 0.31 samples/kJ) However, we predict further advances will be required in order to meet overall power and cost constraints for the DAQ.

As is intrinsic to the fundamental goal of quantum computing, classical simulation of quantum algorithms is notoriously demanding in resource requirements. Nonetheless, simulation is critical to the success of the field and a requirement for algorithm development and validation, as well as hardware design. GPU-acceleration has become standard practice for simulation, and due to the exponential scaling inherent in classical methods, multi-GPU simulation can be required to achieve representative system sizes. In this case, inter-GPU communications can bottleneck performance. In this work, we present the introduction of MPI into the QED-C Application-Oriented Benchmarks to facilitate benchmarking on HPC systems. We review the advances in interconnect technology and the APIs for multi-GPU communication. We benchmark using a variety of interconnect paths, including the recent NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVL72 architecture that represents the first product to expand high-bandwidth GPU-specialized interconnects across multiple nodes. We show that while improvements to GPU architecture have led to speedups of over 4.5X across the last few generations of GPUs, advances in interconnect performance have had a larger impact with over 16X performance improvements in time to solution for multi-GPU simulations.

Multi-agent applications often execute complex tasks as multi-stage workflows, where each stage is an LLM call whose output becomes part of context for subsequent steps. Existing LLM serving systems largely assume homogeneous clusters with identical model replicas. This design overlooks the potential of heterogeneous deployments, where models of different sizes and capabilities enable finer trade-offs between latency and performance. However, heterogeneity introduces new challenges in scheduling across models with diverse throughput and performance. We present Chimera, a predictive scheduling system for multi-agent workflow serving on heterogeneous LLM clusters that jointly improves end-to-end latency and task performance. Chimera applies semantic routing to estimate per-model confidence scores for each request, predicts the total remaining output length of the workflow, and estimates per-model congestion using in-flight predicted token volumes for load balancing. We evaluate Chimera on representative agentic workflows for code generation and math reasoning using multiple heterogeneous LLM configurations. Across comparable settings, Chimera traces the best latency-performance frontier, reducing end-to-end latency by 1.2--2.4times and improving task performance by 8.0-9.5 percentage points on average over competitive baselines including vLLM.

Large language model (LLM) serving infrastructures are undergoing a shift toward heterogeneity and disaggregation. Modern deployments increasingly integrate diverse accelerators and near-memory processing technologies, introducing significant hardware heterogeneity, while system software increasingly separates computation, memory, and model components across distributed resources to improve scalability and efficiency. As a result, LLM serving performance is no longer determined by hardware or software choices in isolation, but by their runtime interaction through scheduling, data movement, and interconnect behavior. However, understanding these interactions remains challenging, as existing simulators lack the ability to jointly model heterogeneous hardware and disaggregated serving techniques within a unified, runtime-driven framework. This paper presents LLMServingSim 2.0, a unified system-level simulator designed to make runtime-driven hardware-software interactions in heterogeneous and disaggregated LLM serving infrastructures explicit and analyzable. LLMServingSim 2.0 embeds serving decisions and hardware behavior into a single runtime loop, enabling interaction-aware modeling of batching, routing, offloading, memory, and power. The simulator supports extensible integration of emerging accelerators and memory systems through profile-based modeling, while capturing dynamic serving behavior and system-level effects. We validate LLMServingSim 2.0 against real deployments, showing that it reproduces key performance, memory, and power metrics with an average error of 0.95%, while maintaining simulation times of around 10 minutes even for complex configurations. These results demonstrate that LLMServingSim 2.0 provides a practical bridge between hardware innovation and serving-system design, enabling systematic exploration and co-design for next-generation LLM serving infrastructures.

A systematic understanding of Apple Silicon is lacking in the current landscape of hardware efficiency; research focus is largely centered on accelerating GPUs for large-scale training or inference on CUDA devices. This paper investigates Apple Silicon's unique memory architecture that offers a unified memory integrating CPU and GPU memory and its implications for on-device LLM inference. We decipher myths about whether Apple Silicon is efficient for on-device inference compared to competitors such as NVIDIA GPUs by directly conducting latency and throughput comparison benchmarks. We explain the performance gap between them through profiling low level hardware metrics - ALU utilization, memory bandwidth, buffer usage, cache residency etc. at runtime. We draw several insights regarding performance bottlenecks such as dequantization overhead, compute throughput and memory bandwidth. We debunk existing false claims regarding large language model inference such as compressing models to lower bit precision is a defacto promise for faster inference across all hardware platforms. We find that the large unified memory enables Apple Silicon to be both cost effective and efficient against NVIDIA GPUs for ultra large language models. Our large scale evaluation on 5 hardware testbeds incorporating three Apple M-series devices: M2 Ultra, M2 Max and M4 Pro and two NVIDIA GPUs: NVIDIA RTX A6000, a multi GPU setup with 2xNVIDIA RTX A6000, 5 model scales ranging from 8B to 405B parameters and 14 quantization schemes gives an understanding of how Apple Silicon fits within the paradigm of on-device LLM inference. Our analysis reveals multiple resource interdependencies and unexpected findings, while also quantifying established insights. To the best of our knowledge, this study makes the first attempt to present a thorough characterization and analysis of Apple Silicon for on-device inference.

Large-scale AI training is now fundamentally a distributed systems problem, and hardware failures have become routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions. Public operational evidence from production training clusters, however, remains scarce. This technical report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The cluster operates within a cross-organizational environment in which five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, and VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This arrangement enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck that did not appear at 2-4-node scale, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. Drawing on a months-long pre-training campaign, we perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, statistical analysis over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures achieves a 10/10 detection rate (2/10 pre-XID) at ~0.84 false positives per day. No single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating a multi-signal detection strategy. Second, profiling 523 checkpoint events along the GPU VRAM to NFS path attributes the "bandwidth paradox" (1.4-10.4% utilization of 200 Gbps RoCE) to saturation of the 128-slot NFS RPC layer. Third, multi-node failure response shows concentrated exclusions (top 3 of 63 nodes account for >50% of all exclusions) and an auto-retry chain success rate of 33.3% over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual recovery rate; the median retry interval is 11 min (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has demonstrated significant advantages as it enables to increase the model capacity without a proportional increase in computation. However, the large MoE model size still introduces substantial memory demands, which usually requires expert offloading on resource-constrained platforms and incurs significant overhead. Hybrid CPU-GPU inference has been proposed to leverage CPU computation to reduce expert loading overhead but faces major challenges: on one hand, the expert activation patterns of MoE models are highly unstable, rendering the fixed mapping strategies in existing works inefficient; on the other hand, the hybrid CPU-GPU schedule for MoE is inherently complex due to the diverse expert sizes, structures, uneven workload distribution, etc. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose HybriMoE, a hybrid CPU-GPU inference framework that improves resource utilization through a novel CPU-GPU scheduling and cache management system. HybriMoE introduces (i) a dynamic intra-layer scheduling strategy to balance workloads across CPU and GPU, (ii) an impact-driven inter-layer prefetching algorithm, and (iii) a score-based caching algorithm to mitigate expert activation instability. We implement HybriMoE on top of the kTransformers framework and evaluate it on three widely used MoE-based LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that HybriMoE achieves an average speedup of 1.33times in the prefill stage and 1.70times in the decode stage compared to state-of-the-art hybrid MoE inference framework. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/HybriMoE.

This document presents a vision for a novel AI infrastructure design that has been initially validated through inference simulations on state-of-the-art large language models. Advancements in deep learning and specialized hardware have driven the rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI systems. However, traditional GPU-centric architectures face scalability challenges for inference workloads due to limitations in memory capacity, bandwidth, and interconnect scaling. To address these issues, the FengHuang Platform, a disaggregated AI infrastructure platform, is proposed to overcome memory and communication scaling limits for AI inference. FengHuang features a multi-tier shared-memory architecture combining high-speed local memory with centralized disaggregated remote memory, enhanced by active tensor paging and near-memory compute for tensor operations. Simulations demonstrate that FengHuang achieves up to 93% local memory capacity reduction, 50% GPU compute savings, and 16x to 70x faster inter-GPU communication compared to conventional GPU scaling. Across workloads such as GPT-3, Grok-1, and QWEN3-235B, FengHuang enables up to 50% GPU reductions while maintaining end-user performance, offering a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution for AI inference infrastructure. FengHuang provides an optimal balance as a rack-level AI infrastructure scale-up solution. Its open, heterogeneous design eliminates vendor lock-in and enhances supply chain flexibility, enabling significant infrastructure and power cost reductions.

The exponential growth in demand for GPU computing resources, driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, has created an urgent need for automated CUDA optimization strategies. While recent advances in LLMs show promise for code generation, current SOTA models (e.g. R1, o1) achieve low success rates in improving CUDA speed. In this paper, we introduce CUDA-L1, an automated reinforcement learning framework for CUDA optimization. CUDA-L1 achieves performance improvements on the CUDA optimization task: trained on NVIDIA A100, it delivers an average speedup of x17.7 across all 250 CUDA kernels of KernelBench, with peak speedups reaching x449. Furthermore, the model also demonstrates excellent portability across GPU architectures, achieving average speedups of x17.8 on H100, x19.0 on RTX 3090, x16.5 on L40, x14.7 on H800, and x13.9 on H20 despite being optimized specifically for A100. Beyond these benchmark results, CUDA-L1 demonstrates several remarkable properties: 1) Discovers a variety of CUDA optimization techniques and learns to combine them strategically to achieve optimal performance; 2) Uncovers fundamental principles of CUDA optimization; 3) Identifies non-obvious performance bottlenecks and rejects seemingly beneficial optimizations that harm performance. The capabilities of CUDA-L1 demonstrate that reinforcement learning can transform an initially poor-performing LLM into an effective CUDA optimizer through speedup-based reward signals alone, without human expertise or domain knowledge. More importantly, the trained RL model extend the acquired reasoning abilities to new kernels. This paradigm opens possibilities for automated optimization of CUDA operations, and holds promise to substantially promote GPU efficiency and alleviate the rising pressure on GPU computing resources.

Graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures are growing in size to meet the increasing compute and memory requirements. As GPU sizes increase, intra-socket wire transfer delay increases significantly. While previous research has optimized for compute and memory locality within a socket, the spatial impact on inter-GPU communication has not been well-studied. We introduce the term non-uniform network access (NUNA) to describe this emerging optimization dimension in multi-GPU systems. We specifically focus on latency-sensitive collective communication, common in machine learning inference. First, we highlight the need for NUNA-aware routing (NAR), choosing optimized, spatially-aware inter-GPU paths in large scale-up network topologies. Second, we introduce NUNA-aware placement (NAP), placing threadblocks and data near I/O to optimize the inter-GPU traffic. We demonstrate that the NAP optimizations alone offer up to 1.5x collective speedups over a locality-unaware baseline. Combining NAP with NAR yields up to 1.8x faster collectives over the locality-unaware baseline. This leads to 7% mean (28% max) time per output token speedup in machine learning inference.

Serving Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for AI-powered applications but demands substantial computational resources, particularly in memory bandwidth and computational throughput. Low-precision computation has emerged as a key technique to improve efficiency while reducing resource consumption. Existing approaches for generating low-precision kernels are limited to weight bit widths that are powers of two and suffer from suboptimal performance due to high-level GPU programming abstractions. These abstractions restrict critical optimizations, such as fine-grained register management and optimized memory access patterns, which are essential for efficient low-precision computations. In this paper, we introduce a virtual machine (VM) designed for General-Purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing, enabling support for low-precision data types with arbitrary bit widths while maintaining GPU programmability. The proposed VM features a thread-block-level programming model, a hierarchical memory space, a novel algebraic layout system, and extensive support for diverse low-precision data types. VM programs are compiled into highly efficient GPU programs with automatic vectorization and instruction selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VM efficiently supports a full spectrum of low-precision data types, and outperforms state-of-the-art low-precision kernels on their supported types. Compared to existing compilers like Triton and Ladder, as well as hand-optimized kernels such as QuantLLM and Marlin, our VM achieves performance improvements of 1.75x, 2.61x, 1.29x and 1.03x, respectively.

Optimizing GPU kernels manually is a challenging and time-consuming task. With the rapid development of LLMs, automated GPU kernel optimization is gradually becoming a tangible reality. However, current LLM-driven automated optimization methods narrowly focus on machine learning applications, such as PyTorch operator optimization, while overlooking broader domains like sparse matrix operations in scientific computing. Extending to these broader applications brings new challenges for the benchmark and algorithm. Therefore, developing a general-purpose automated kernel optimization method becomes our primary focus. In this paper, we address the absence of systematic evaluation for multi-scenario settings by introducing MSKernelBench, which spans multiple scenarios, including fundamental algebraic operations, common LLM kernels, sparse matrix operators, and scientific computing routines, each supporting both FP32 and BF16 precision. Building on this benchmark, we introduce CUDAMaster, a multi-agent, hardware-aware system for kernel optimization that leverages profiling information and automatically constructs the full compilation and execution toolchain. Experimental results demonstrate that CUDAMaster achieves significant speedups across most operators, outperforming Astra by about 35%. In several cases, its performance matches or surpasses that of highly optimized, closed-source libraries such as cuBLAS. A demo showcasing the original and optimized code for each operator is available at https://hanyx2021.github.io/MSKernelBenchDemo/.

In parallel simulation, convergence and parallelism are often seen as inherently conflicting objectives. Improved parallelism typically entails lighter local computation and weaker coupling, which unavoidably slow the global convergence. This paper presents a novel GPU algorithm that achieves convergence rates comparable to fullspace Newton's method while maintaining good parallelizability just like the Jacobi method. Our approach is built on a key insight into the phenomenon of overshoot. Overshoot occurs when a local solver aggressively minimizes its local energy without accounting for the global context, resulting in a local update that undermines global convergence. To address this, we derive a theoretically second-order optimal solution to mitigate overshoot. Furthermore, we adapt this solution into a pre-computable form. Leveraging Cubature sampling, our runtime cost is only marginally higher than the Jacobi method, yet our algorithm converges nearly quadratically as Newton's method. We also introduce a novel full-coordinate formulation for more efficient pre-computation. Our method integrates seamlessly with the incremental potential contact method and achieves second-order convergence for both stiff and soft materials. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach delivers high-quality simulations and outperforms state-of-the-art GPU methods with 50 to 100 times better convergence.

With the rise of AI, NVIDIA GPUs have become the de facto standard for AI system design. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of Intel Gaudi NPUs as an alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model serving. First, we create a suite of microbenchmarks to compare Intel Gaudi-2 with NVIDIA A100, showing that Gaudi-2 achieves competitive performance not only in primitive AI compute, memory, and communication operations but also in executing several important AI workloads end-to-end. We then assess Gaudi NPU's programmability by discussing several software-level optimization strategies to employ for implementing critical FBGEMM operators and vLLM, evaluating their efficiency against GPU-optimized counterparts. Results indicate that Gaudi-2 achieves energy efficiency comparable to A100, though there are notable areas for improvement in terms of software maturity. Overall, we conclude that, with effective integration into high-level AI frameworks, Gaudi NPUs could challenge NVIDIA GPU's dominance in the AI server market, though further improvements are necessary to fully compete with NVIDIA's robust software ecosystem.

While the large energy consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is recognized by the community, system operators lack guidance for energy-efficient LLM inference deployments that leverage energy trade-offs of heterogeneous hardware due to a lack of energy-aware benchmarks and data. In this work we address this gap with Watt Counts: the largest open-access dataset of energy consumption of LLMs, with over 5,000 experiments for 50 LLMs across 10 NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in batch and server scenarios along with a reproducible, open-source benchmark that enables community submissions to expand this dataset. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a system-level study of LLM inference across heterogeneous GPU architectures and show that GPU selection is crucial for energy efficiency outcomes and that optimal hardware choices vary significantly across models and deployment scenarios, demonstrating the critical importance of hardware-aware deployment in heterogeneous LLM systems. Guided by our data and insights, we show that practitioners can reduce energy consumption by up to 70% in server scenarios with negligible impact on user experience, and by up to 20% in batch scenarios.

We introduce PTXBench, a benchmark for evaluating and adapting large language models (LLMs) to use architecture-specific PTX for GPU kernel optimization. PTXBench measures functional correctness, whether selected target instructions execute at runtime, and speedup over frontier libraries across GEMM and attention workloads on H100 and B200 GPUs. Our evaluation shows that architecture-specific PTX capability remains uneven: success rates fall substantially on complex attention backward workloads, and executing the target instructions does not necessarily translate into competitive performance. No evaluated model consistently matches frontier libraries across the suite. We further adapt Qwen3.6-27B using supervised fine-tuning. Repair-conditioned training improves several tasks, but generalization remains uneven; data coverage, balance, and the quality of the reasoning teacher matter in addition to dataset size. PTXBench provides an auditable testbed for measuring and improving LLMs' ability to exploit evolving GPU architectures.

Monolithic serving with chunked prefill improves GPU utilization by batching prefill and decode together, but suffers from fine-grained phase interference. Engine-level prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation avoids interference but incurs higher hardware and coordination overhead. Prior intra-GPU disaggregation approaches multiplex prefill and decode within a single GPU, using SLO-based tuning guided by heuristics from offline profiling or reactive feedback loops. However, these methods respond reactively to performance issues rather than anticipating them, limiting adaptability under dynamic workloads. We ask: can we achieve proactive intra-GPU disaggregation that adapts effectively to dynamic workloads? The key challenge lies in managing the conflicting resource demands of prefill and decode under varying conditions. We first show that GPU resources exhibit diminishing returns -- beyond a saturation point, more allocation yields minimal latency benefit. Second, we observe that memory bandwidth contention becomes a critical bottleneck. These insights motivate a design that dynamically partitions GPU resources across prefill and decode phases, while jointly considering compute capacity, memory footprint, and bandwidth contention. Evaluated on diverse LLMs and workloads, our system Nexus achieves up to 2.2x higher throughput, 20x lower TTFT, and 2.5x lower TBT than vLLM; outperforms SGLang by up to 2x; and matches or exceeds disaggregated vLLM.

AMD GPUs offer state-of-the-art compute and memory bandwidth; however, peak performance AMD kernels are written in raw assembly. To address the difficulty of mapping AI algorithms to hardware, recent work proposes C++ embedded and PyTorch-inspired domain-specific languages like ThunderKittens (TK) to simplify high performance AI kernel development on NVIDIA hardware. We explore the extent to which such primitives -- for explicit tile-based programming with optimized memory accesses and fine-grained asynchronous execution across workers -- are NVIDIA-specific or general. We provide the first detailed study of the programming primitives that lead to performant AMD AI kernels, and we encapsulate these insights in the HipKittens (HK) programming framework. We find that tile-based abstractions used in prior DSLs generalize to AMD GPUs, however we need to rethink the algorithms that instantiate these abstractions for AMD. We validate the HK primitives across CDNA3 and CDNA4 AMD platforms. In evaluations, HK kernels compete with AMD's hand-optimized assembly kernels for GEMMs and attention, and consistently outperform compiler baselines. Moreover, assembly is difficult to scale to the breadth of AI workloads; reflecting this, in some settings HK outperforms all available kernel baselines by 1.2-2.4times (e.g., d=64 attention, GQA backwards, memory-bound kernels). These findings help pave the way for a single, tile-based software layer for high-performance AI kernels that translates across GPU vendors. HipKittens is released at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/HipKittens.

Traditional fixed test sets fall short in evaluating open-ended capabilities of foundation models. To address this, we propose ONEBench(OpeN-Ended Benchmarking), a new testing paradigm that consolidates individual evaluation datasets into a unified, ever-expanding sample pool. ONEBench allows users to generate custom, open-ended evaluation benchmarks from this pool, corresponding to specific capabilities of interest. By aggregating samples across test sets, ONEBench enables the assessment of diverse capabilities beyond those covered by the original test sets, while mitigating overfitting and dataset bias. Most importantly, it frames model evaluation as a collective process of selecting and aggregating sample-level tests. The shift from task-specific benchmarks to ONEBench introduces two challenges: (1)heterogeneity and (2)incompleteness. Heterogeneity refers to the aggregation over diverse metrics, while incompleteness describes comparing models evaluated on different data subsets. To address these challenges, we explore algorithms to aggregate sparse measurements into reliable model scores. Our aggregation algorithm ensures identifiability(asymptotically recovering ground-truth scores) and rapid convergence, enabling accurate model ranking with less data. On homogenous datasets, we show our aggregation algorithm provides rankings that highly correlate with those produced by average scores. We also demonstrate robustness to ~95% of measurements missing, reducing evaluation cost by up to 20x with little-to-no change in model rankings. We introduce ONEBench-LLM for language models and ONEBench-LMM for vision-language models, unifying evaluations across these domains. Overall, we present a technique for open-ended evaluation, which can aggregate over incomplete, heterogeneous sample-level measurements to continually grow a benchmark alongside the rapidly developing foundation models.

While the rapid expansion of data centers poses challenges for power grids, it also offers new opportunities as potentially flexible loads. Existing power system research often abstracts data centers as aggregate resources, while computer system research primarily focuses on optimizing GPU energy efficiency and largely ignores the grid impacts of optimized GPU power consumption. To bridge this gap, we develop a GPU-to-Grid framework that couples device-level GPU control with power system objectives. We study distribution-level voltage regulation enabled by flexibility in LLM inference, using batch size as a control knob that trades off the voltage impacts of GPU power consumption against inference latency and token throughput. We first formulate this problem as an optimization problem and then realize it as an online feedback optimization controller that leverages measurements from both the power grid and GPU systems. Our key insight is that reducing GPU power consumption alleviates violations of lower voltage limits, while increasing GPU power mitigates violations near upper voltage limits in distribution systems; this runs counter to the common belief that minimizing GPU power consumption is always beneficial to power grids.

This paper presents MoE-Gen, a high-throughput MoE inference system optimized for single-GPU execution. Existing inference systems rely on model-based or continuous batching strategies, originally designed for interactive inference, which result in excessively small batches for MoE's key modules-attention and expert modules-leading to poor throughput. To address this, we introduce module-based batching, which accumulates tokens in host memory and dynamically launches large batches on GPUs to maximize utilization. Additionally, we optimize the choice of batch sizes for each module in an MoE to fully overlap GPU computation and communication, maximizing throughput. Evaluation demonstrates that MoE-Gen achieves 8-31x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems employing model-based batching (FlexGen, MoE-Lightning, DeepSpeed), and offers even greater throughput improvements over continuous batching systems (e.g., vLLM and Ollama) on popular MoE models (DeepSeek and Mixtral) across offline inference tasks. MoE-Gen's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/EfficientMoE/MoE-Gen

Reinforcement learning has demonstrated great potential for performing financial tasks. However, it faces two major challenges: policy instability and sampling bottlenecks. In this paper, we revisit ensemble methods with massively parallel simulations on graphics processing units (GPUs), significantly enhancing the computational efficiency and robustness of trained models in volatile financial markets. Our approach leverages the parallel processing capability of GPUs to significantly improve the sampling speed for training ensemble models. The ensemble models combine the strengths of component agents to improve the robustness of financial decision-making strategies. We conduct experiments in both stock and cryptocurrency trading tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Massively parallel simulation on a single GPU improves the sampling speed by up to 1,746times using 2,048 parallel environments compared to a single environment. The ensemble models have high cumulative returns and outperform some individual agents, reducing maximum drawdown by up to 4.17% and improving the Sharpe ratio by up to 0.21. This paper describes trading tasks at ACM ICAIF FinRL Contests in 2023 and 2024.

Large language models have led to state-of-the-art accuracies across a range of tasks. However, training these models efficiently is challenging for two reasons: a) GPU memory capacity is limited, making it impossible to fit large models on even a multi-GPU server, and b) the number of compute operations required to train these models can result in unrealistically long training times. Consequently, new methods of model parallelism such as tensor and pipeline parallelism have been proposed. Unfortunately, naive usage of these methods leads to fundamental scaling issues at thousands of GPUs, e.g., due to expensive cross-node communication or devices spending significant time waiting on other devices to make progress. In this paper, we show how different types of parallelism methods (tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism) can be composed to scale to thousands of GPUs and models with trillions of parameters. We survey techniques for pipeline parallelism and propose a novel interleaved pipeline parallelism schedule that can improve throughput by 10+% with memory footprint comparable to existing approaches. We quantitatively study the trade-offs between tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism, and provide intuition as to how to configure distributed training of a large model. Our approach allows us to perform training iterations on a model with 1 trillion parameters at 502 petaFLOP/s on 3072 GPUs with achieved per-GPU throughput of 52% of theoretical peak. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/nvidia/megatron-lm.

Both biological and artificial neural networks inherently balance their performance with their operational cost, which balances their computational abilities. Typically, an efficient neuromorphic neural network is one that learns representations that reduce the redundancies and dimensionality of its input. This is for instance achieved in sparse coding, and sparse representations derived from natural images yield representations that are heterogeneous, both in their sampling of input features and in the variance of those features. Here, we investigated the connection between natural images' structure, particularly oriented features, and their corresponding sparse codes. We showed that representations of input features scattered across multiple levels of variance substantially improve the sparseness and resilience of sparse codes, at the cost of reconstruction performance. This echoes the structure of the model's input, allowing to account for the heterogeneously aleatoric structures of natural images. We demonstrate that learning kernel from natural images produces heterogeneity by balancing between approximate and dense representations, which improves all reconstruction metrics. Using a parametrized control of the kernels' heterogeneity used by a convolutional sparse coding algorithm, we show that heterogeneity emphasizes sparseness, while homogeneity improves representation granularity. In a broader context, these encoding strategy can serve as inputs to deep convolutional neural networks. We prove that such variance-encoded sparse image datasets enhance computational efficiency, emphasizing the benefits of kernel heterogeneity to leverage naturalistic and variant input structures and possible applications to improve the throughput of neuromorphic hardware.

Deploying multiple models within shared GPU clusters is a key strategy to improve resource efficiency in large language model (LLM) serving. Existing multi-LLM serving systems improve GPU utilization at the cost of degraded inference performance, particularly time-to-first-token (TTFT). We attribute this degradation to the lack of awareness regarding future workload characteristics. In contrast, recent analyses have shown the strong periodicity and long-term predictability of real-world LLM serving workloads. In this paper, we propose one-for-many GPU prewarming, which proactively loads parameters from multiple models onto GPUs based on workload forecasts. These prewarmed weights enable the system to promptly instantiate serving instances upon encountering request bursts. We design and implement WarmServe, a multi-LLM serving system incorporating three key techniques: (1) a model placement algorithm that optimizes prewarming decisions to minimize cross-model prewarming interference, (2) a KV cache reservation strategy that repurposes idle KV cache space on running GPUs for prewarming new models, and (3) an efficient GPU memory switching mechanism for tensor management. Evaluation on real-world datasets shows that WarmServe reduces tail TTFT by up to 50.8times compared to the state-of-the-art autoscaling-based system, while supporting up to 2.5times higher request throughput than the GPU-sharing system.

k-means has historically been positioned primarily as an offline processing primitive, typically used for dataset organization or embedding preprocessing rather than as a first-class component in online systems. In this work, we revisit this classical algorithm under the lens of modern AI system design and enable k-means as an online primitive. We point out that existing GPU implementations of k-means remain fundamentally bottlenecked by low-level system constraints rather than theoretical algorithmic complexity. Specifically, the assignment stage suffers from a severe IO bottleneck due to the massive explicit materialization of the N times K distance matrix in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Simultaneously, the centroid update stage is heavily penalized by hardware-level atomic write contention caused by irregular, scatter-style token aggregations. To bridge this performance gap, we propose flash-kmeans, an IO-aware and contention-free k-means implementation for modern GPU workloads. Flash-kmeans introduces two core kernel-level innovations: (1) FlashAssign, which fuses distance computation with an online argmin to completely bypass intermediate memory materialization; (2) sort-inverse update, which explicitly constructs an inverse mapping to transform high-contention atomic scatters into high-bandwidth, segment-level localized reductions. Furthermore, we integrate algorithm-system co-designs, including chunked-stream overlap and cache-aware compile heuristics, to ensure practical deployability. Extensive evaluations on NVIDIA H200 GPUs demonstrate that flash-kmeans achieves up to 17.9times end-to-end speedup over best baselines, while outperforming industry-standard libraries like cuML and FAISS by 33times and over 200times, respectively.

The rapid growth of deep learning has driven exponential increases in model parameters and computational demands. NVIDIA GPUs and their CUDA-based software ecosystem provide robust support for parallel computing, significantly alleviating computational bottlenecks. Meanwhile, due to the cultivation of user programming habits and the high performance of GPUs, the CUDA ecosystem has established a dominant position in the field of parallel software. This dominance requires other hardware platforms to support CUDA-based software with performance portability. However, translating CUDA code to other platforms poses significant challenges due to differences in parallel programming paradigms and hardware architectures. Existing approaches rely on language extensions, domain-specific languages (DSLs), or compilers but face limitations in workload coverage and generalizability. Moreover, these methods often incur substantial development costs. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated extraordinary potential in various vertical domains, especially in code-related tasks. However, the performance of existing LLMs in CUDA transpilation, particularly for high-performance code, remains suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for generating high-performance CUDA and corresponding platform code pairs, leveraging AI compiler and automatic optimization technology. We further enhance the framework with a graph-based data augmentation method and introduce HPCTransEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLM performance on CUDA transpilation. We conduct experiments using CUDA-to-CPU transpilation as a case study on leading LLMs. The speedup ratio of the CPU operators has an average improvemnet of 43.8\%, highlighting the potential of LLMs to address compatibility challenges within the CUDA ecosystem. Our code is available at https://github.com/PJLAB-CHIP/HPCTransCompile.

Due to the high resource demands of Large Language Models (LLMs), achieving widespread deployment on consumer-grade devices presents significant challenges. Typically, personal or consumer-grade devices, including servers configured prior to the era of large-scale models, generally have relatively weak GPUs and relatively strong CPUs. However, most current methods primarily depend on GPUs for computation. Therefore, we propose Dovetail, an approach that deploys the draft model on the GPU to generate draft tokens while allowing the target model to perform parallel verification on the CPU, thereby improving the utilization of all available hardware resources and occupying less inter-device communication bandwidth. Accordingly, we have redesigned the draft model to better align with heterogeneous hardware characteristics. To this end, we implemented several optimizations: reducing the number of draft tokens to mitigate latency in parallel verification, increasing the depth of the draft model to enhance its predictive capacity, and introducing DGF (Dynamic Gating Fusion) to improve the integration of features and token embeddings. In the HumanEval benchmark, Dovetail achieved an inference speed of 5.86 tokens per second for LLaMA2-Chat-7B using 3GB of VRAM, representing an approximately 2.77x improvement over CPU-only inference. Furthermore, the inference speed was increased to 8 tokens per second when utilizing 7GB of VRAM.

We report on the first large-scale mixture-of-experts (MoE) pretraining study on pure AMD hardware, utilizing both MI300X GPUs with Pollara interconnect. We distill practical guidance for both systems and model design. On the systems side, we deliver a comprehensive cluster and networking characterization: microbenchmarks for all core collectives (all-reduce, reduce-scatter, all-gather, broadcast) across message sizes and GPU counts on Pollara. To our knowledge, this is the first at this scale. We further provide MI300X microbenchmarks on kernel sizing and memory bandwidth to inform model design. On the modeling side, we introduce and apply MI300X-aware transformer sizing rules for attention and MLP blocks and justify MoE widths that jointly optimize training throughput and inference latency. We describe our training stack in depth, including often-ignored utilities such as fault-tolerance and checkpoint-reshaping, as well as detailed information on our training recipe. We also provide a preview of our model architecture and base model - ZAYA1 (760M active, 8.3B total parameters MoE) - which will be further improved upon in forthcoming papers. ZAYA1-base achieves performance comparable to leading base models such as Qwen3-4B and Gemma3-12B at its scale and larger, and outperforms models including Llama-3-8B and OLMoE across reasoning, mathematics, and coding benchmarks. Together, these results demonstrate that the AMD hardware, network, and software stack are mature and optimized enough for competitive large-scale pretraining.

In the machine learning ecosystem, hardware selection is often regarded as a mere utility, overshadowed by the spotlight on algorithms and data. This oversight is particularly problematic in contexts like ML-as-a-service platforms, where users often lack control over the hardware used for model deployment. How does the choice of hardware impact generalization properties? This paper investigates the influence of hardware on the delicate balance between model performance and fairness. We demonstrate that hardware choices can exacerbate existing disparities, attributing these discrepancies to variations in gradient flows and loss surfaces across different demographic groups. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, the paper not only identifies the underlying factors but also proposes an effective strategy for mitigating hardware-induced performance imbalances.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have enabled the scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) by achieving massive parameter counts while maintaining computational efficiency. However, MoEs introduce several inference-time challenges, including load imbalance across experts and the additional routing computational overhead. To address these challenges and fully harness the benefits of MoE, a systematic evaluation of hardware acceleration techniques is essential. We present MoE-Inference-Bench, a comprehensive study to evaluate MoE performance across diverse scenarios. We analyze the impact of batch size, sequence length, and critical MoE hyperparameters such as FFN dimensions and number of experts on throughput. We evaluate several optimization techniques on Nvidia H100 GPUs, including pruning, Fused MoE operations, speculative decoding, quantization, and various parallelization strategies. Our evaluation includes MoEs from the Mixtral, DeepSeek, OLMoE and Qwen families. The results reveal performance differences across configurations and provide insights for the efficient deployment of MoEs.

Rendering and inverse-rendering algorithms that drive conventional computer graphics have recently been superseded by neural representations (NR). NRs have recently been used to learn the geometric and the material properties of the scenes and use the information to synthesize photorealistic imagery, thereby promising a replacement for traditional rendering algorithms with scalable quality and predictable performance. In this work we ask the question: Does neural graphics (NG) need hardware support? We studied representative NG applications showing that, if we want to render 4k res. at 60FPS there is a gap of 1.5X-55X in the desired performance on current GPUs. For AR/VR applications, there is an even larger gap of 2-4 OOM between the desired performance and the required system power. We identify that the input encoding and the MLP kernels are the performance bottlenecks, consuming 72%,60% and 59% of application time for multi res. hashgrid, multi res. densegrid and low res. densegrid encodings, respectively. We propose a NG processing cluster, a scalable and flexible hardware architecture that directly accelerates the input encoding and MLP kernels through dedicated engines and supports a wide range of NG applications. We also accelerate the rest of the kernels by fusing them together in Vulkan, which leads to 9.94X kernel-level performance improvement compared to un-fused implementation of the pre-processing and the post-processing kernels. Our results show that, NGPC gives up to 58X end-to-end application-level performance improvement, for multi res. hashgrid encoding on average across the four NG applications, the performance benefits are 12X,20X,33X and 39X for the scaling factor of 8,16,32 and 64, respectively. Our results show that with multi res. hashgrid encoding, NGPC enables the rendering of 4k res. at 30FPS for NeRF and 8k res. at 120FPS for all our other NG applications.

Machine learning (ML) model serving has become a dominant consumer of GPU infrastructure, yet capacity planning in these systems remains largely ad hoc. Under-provisioning leads to service-level objective (SLO) violations and production incidents, while over-provisioning results in substantial resource waste. This paper presents \sys, an industrial load testing framework for ML serving systems that systematically estimates serving capacity through an adaptive, feedback-driven search strategy. The approach leverages real-time performance signals, incorporating dampening, spike tolerance, and convergence detection to efficiently identify maximum sustainable throughput under SLO constraints. We evaluate \sys through a longitudinal analysis of 14 industrial case studies spanning four ML architecture classes: recommendation, ranking, vision, and NLP. This study demonstrates that systematic load testing leads to substantial improvements in GPU resource efficiency and operational reliability. Prior to adopting \sys, a significant fraction of model launches were under-provisioned, resulting in recurring incidents; these issues were substantially reduced after deployment. Our results show that ML-specific design decisions are critical to accurate capacity estimation: workload calibration using recorded traffic reduces estimation error from approximately 30\% to 2--6\%, while proper warmup handling yields a 22.2\% improvement in accuracy. Further analysis reveals key factors influencing prediction error, including model size and co-location effects. This paper distills six lessons and derive architectural guidelines for ML load testing, offering actionable insights for building reliable and efficient ML serving systems.

Bessel functions are critical in scientific computing for applications such as machine learning, protein structure modeling, and robotics. However, currently, available routines lack precision or fail for certain input ranges, such as when the order v is large, and GPU-specific implementations are limited. We address the precision limitations of current numerical implementations while dramatically improving the runtime. We propose two novel algorithms for computing the logarithm of modified Bessel functions of the first and second kinds by computing intermediate values on a logarithmic scale. Our algorithms are robust and never have issues with underflows or overflows while having relative errors on the order of machine precision, even for inputs where existing libraries fail. In C++/CUDA, our algorithms have median and maximum speedups of 45x and 6150x for GPU and 17x and 3403x for CPU, respectively, over the ranges of inputs and third-party libraries tested. Compared to SciPy, the algorithms have median and maximum speedups of 77x and 300x for GPU and 35x and 98x for CPU, respectively, over the tested inputs. The ability to robustly compute a solution and the low relative errors allow us to fit von Mises-Fisher, vMF, distributions to high-dimensional neural network features. This is, e.g., relevant for uncertainty quantification in metric learning. We obtain image feature data by processing CIFAR10 training images with the convolutional layers of a pre-trained ResNet50. We successfully fit vMF distributions to 2048-, 8192-, and 32768-dimensional image feature data using our algorithms. Our approach provides fast and accurate results while existing implementations in SciPy and mpmath fail to fit successfully. Our approach is readily implementable on GPUs, and we provide a fast open-source implementation alongside this paper.

The singular value decomposition (SVD) is a powerful tool in modern numerical linear algebra, which underpins computational methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), low-rank approximations, and randomized algorithms. Many practical scenarios require solving numerous small SVD problems, a regime generally referred to as "batch SVD". Existing programming models can handle this efficiently on parallel CPU architectures, but high-performance solutions for GPUs remain immature. A GPU-oriented batch SVD solver is introduced. This solver exploits the one-sided Jacobi algorithm to exploit fine-grained parallelism, and a number of algorithmic and design optimizations achieve unmatched performance. Starting from a baseline solver, a sequence of optimizations is applied to obtain incremental performance gains. Numerical experiments show that the new solver is robust across problems with different numerical properties, matrix shapes, and arithmetic precisions. Performance benchmarks on both NVIDIA and AMD systems show significant performance speedups over vendor solutions as well as existing open-source solvers.

We present MOFA, an open-source generative AI (GenAI) plus simulation workflow for high-throughput generation of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) on large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems. MOFA addresses key challenges in integrating GPU-accelerated computing for GPU-intensive GenAI tasks, including distributed training and inference, alongside CPU- and GPU-optimized tasks for screening and filtering AI-generated MOFs using molecular dynamics, density functional theory, and Monte Carlo simulations. These heterogeneous tasks are unified within an online learning framework that optimizes the utilization of available CPU and GPU resources across HPC systems. Performance metrics from a 450-node (14,400 AMD Zen 3 CPUs + 1800 NVIDIA A100 GPUs) supercomputer run demonstrate that MOFA achieves high-throughput generation of novel MOF structures, with CO_2 adsorption capacities ranking among the top 10 in the hypothetical MOF (hMOF) dataset. Furthermore, the production of high-quality MOFs exhibits a linear relationship with the number of nodes utilized. The modular architecture of MOFA will facilitate its integration into other scientific applications that dynamically combine GenAI with large-scale simulations.

The real-time deployment of cascaded generative AI pipelines for applications like video translation is constrained by significant system-level challenges. These include the cumulative latency of sequential model inference and the quadratic (O(N^2)) computational complexity that renders multi-user video conferencing applications unscalable. This paper proposes and evaluates a practical system-level framework designed to mitigate these critical bottlenecks. The proposed architecture incorporates a turn-taking mechanism to reduce computational complexity from quadratic to linear in multi-user scenarios, and a segmented processing protocol to manage inference latency for a perceptually real-time experience. We implement a proof-of-concept pipeline and conduct a rigorous performance analysis across a multi-tiered hardware setup, including commodity (NVIDIA RTX 4060), cloud (NVIDIA T4), and enterprise (NVIDIA A100) GPUs. Our objective evaluation demonstrates that the system achieves real-time throughput (τ< 1.0) on modern hardware. A subjective user study further validates the approach, showing that a predictable, initial processing delay is highly acceptable to users in exchange for a smooth, uninterrupted playback experience. The work presents a validated, end-to-end system design that offers a practical roadmap for deploying scalable, real-time generative AI applications in multilingual communication platforms.

High-performance GPU kernel optimization remains a critical yet labor-intensive task in modern machine learning workloads. Although Triton, a domain-specific language for GPU programming, enables developers to write efficient kernels with concise code, achieving expert-level performance still requires deep understanding of GPU architectures and low-level performance trade-offs. We present TritonForge, a profiling-guided framework for automated Triton kernel optimization. TritonForge integrates kernel analysis, runtime profiling, and iterative code transformation to streamline the optimization process. By incorporating feedback from profiling results, the system identifies performance bottlenecks, proposes targeted code modifications, and evaluates their impact automatically. Across diverse kernel types, TritonForge achieves up to 5x performance improvement over baseline implementations and on average 1.76x of the cases are successful, providing a foundation for future research in automated GPU performance optimization.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has become essential for domain adaptation, but its memory-intensive property exceeds the capabilities of most GPUs. To address this challenge and democratize LLM fine-tuning, we present SlideFormer, a novel system designed for single-GPU environments. Our innovations are: (1) A lightweight asynchronous engine that treats the GPU as a sliding window and overlaps GPU computation with CPU updates and multi-tier I/O. (2) A highly efficient heterogeneous memory management scheme significantly reduces peak memory usage. (3) Optimized Triton kernels to solve key bottlenecks and integrated advanced I/O. This collaborative design enables fine-tuning of the latest 123B+ models on a single RTX 4090, supporting up to 8x larger batch sizes and 6x larger models. In evaluations, SlideFormer achieves 1.40x to 6.27x higher throughput while roughly halving CPU/GPU memory usage compared to baselines, sustaining >95% peak performance on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures achieve remarkable performance improvements, but their random expert selection mechanism introduces significant data movement overhead that becomes the dominant bottleneck in multi-unit serving systems. To forecast the patterns underlying this data movement, we conduct comprehensive data-movement-centric profiling across three state-of-the-art large-scale MoE models (200B- 671B) using over 24,000 requests spanning diverse workloads. With the resulting 150GB+ trace files, we perform systematic analysis from both temporal and spatial perspectives and distill six key insights to guide the design of diverse future serving systems. Taking wafer-scale GPUs as a case study, we demonstrate that minor architectural modifications leveraging our insights achieve substantial performance gains, delivering 6.3X and 4.0X average speedups on DeepSeek V3 and Qwen3, respectively. Our work provides the first comprehensive data-centric analysis of MoE models at scale. Our profiling traces and analysis results are publicly available at {https://huggingface.co/datasets/core12345/MoE_expert_selection_trace. We will also release our simulation framework shortly to facilitate future research in this area.

The recent shift in Generative AI (GenAI) applications from cloud-only environments to end-user devices introduces new challenges in resource management, system efficiency, and user experience. This paper presents ConsumerBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework designed to evaluate the system efficiency and response time of GenAI models running on end-user devices. Unlike existing benchmarks that assume exclusive model access on dedicated GPUs, ConsumerBench simulates realistic multi-application scenarios executing concurrently on constrained hardware. Furthermore, ConsumerBench supports customizable workflows that simulate complex tasks requiring coordination among multiple applications. ConsumerBench captures both application-level metrics, including latency and Service Level Objective (SLO) attainment, and system-level metrics like CPU/GPU utilization and memory bandwidth. Through extensive experiments, ConsumerBench reveals inefficiencies in resource sharing, unfair scheduling under greedy allocation, and performance pitfalls of static model server configurations. The paper also provides practical insights for model developers and system designers, highlighting the benefits of custom kernels tailored to consumer-grade GPU architectures and the value of implementing SLO-aware scheduling strategies.

As a promising approach to deal with distributed data, Federated Learning (FL) achieves major advancements in recent years. FL enables collaborative model training by exploiting the raw data dispersed in multiple edge devices. However, the data is generally non-independent and identically distributed, i.e., statistical heterogeneity, and the edge devices significantly differ in terms of both computation and communication capacity, i.e., system heterogeneity. The statistical heterogeneity leads to severe accuracy degradation while the system heterogeneity significantly prolongs the training process. In order to address the heterogeneity issue, we propose an Asynchronous Staleness-aware Model Update FL framework, i.e., FedASMU, with two novel methods. First, we propose an asynchronous FL system model with a dynamical model aggregation method between updated local models and the global model on the server for superior accuracy and high efficiency. Then, we propose an adaptive local model adjustment method by aggregating the fresh global model with local models on devices to further improve the accuracy. Extensive experimentation with 6 models and 5 public datasets demonstrates that FedASMU significantly outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy (0.60% to 23.90% higher) and efficiency (3.54% to 97.98% faster).

Deploying large language models (LLMs) for online inference is often constrained by limited GPU memory, particularly due to the growing KV cache during auto-regressive decoding. Hybrid GPU-CPU execution has emerged as a promising solution by offloading KV cache management and parts of attention computation to the CPU. However, a key bottleneck remains: existing schedulers fail to effectively overlap CPU-offloaded tasks with GPU execution during the latency-critical, bandwidth-bound decode phase. This particularly penalizes real-time, decode-heavy applications (e.g., chat, Chain-of-Thought reasoning) which are currently underserved by existing systems, especially under memory pressure typical of edge or low-cost deployments. We present APEX, a novel, profiling-informed scheduling strategy that maximizes CPU-GPU parallelism during hybrid LLM inference. Unlike systems relying on static rules or purely heuristic approaches, APEX dynamically dispatches compute across heterogeneous resources by predicting execution times of CPU and GPU subtasks to maximize overlap while avoiding scheduling overheads. We evaluate APEX on diverse workloads and GPU architectures (NVIDIA T4, A10), using LLaMa-2-7B and LLaMa-3.1-8B models. Compared to GPU-only schedulers like VLLM, APEX improves throughput by 84% - 96% on T4 and 11% - 89% on A10 GPUs, while preserving latency. Against the best existing hybrid schedulers, it delivers up to 49% (T4) and 37% (A10) higher throughput in long-output settings. APEX significantly advances hybrid LLM inference efficiency on such memory-constrained hardware and provides a blueprint for scheduling in heterogeneous AI systems, filling a critical gap for efficient real-time LLM applications.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models can achieve promising results with outrageous large amount of parameters but constant computation cost, and thus it has become a trend in model scaling. Still it is a mystery how MoE layers bring quality gains by leveraging the parameters with sparse activation. In this work, we investigate several key factors in sparse expert models. We observe that load imbalance may not be a significant problem affecting model quality, contrary to the perspectives of recent studies, while the number of sparsely activated experts k and expert capacity C in top-k routing can significantly make a difference in this context. Furthermore, we take a step forward to propose a simple method called expert prototyping that splits experts into different prototypes and applies k top-1 routing. This strategy improves the model quality but maintains constant computational costs, and our further exploration on extremely large-scale models reflects that it is more effective in training larger models. We push the model scale to over 1 trillion parameters and implement it on solely 480 NVIDIA V100-32GB GPUs, in comparison with the recent SOTAs on 2048 TPU cores. The proposed giant model achieves substantial speedup in convergence over the same-size baseline.

Many mission-critical systems are based on GPU for inference. It requires not only high recognition accuracy but also low latency in responding time. Although many studies are devoted to optimizing the structure of deep models for efficient inference, most of them do not leverage the architecture of modern GPU for fast inference, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a general principle for designing GPU-efficient networks based on extensive empirical studies. This design principle enables us to search for GPU-efficient network structures effectively by a simple and lightweight method as opposed to most Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods that are complicated and computationally expensive. Based on the proposed framework, we design a family of GPU-Efficient Networks, or GENets in short. We did extensive evaluations on multiple GPU platforms and inference engines. While achieving geq 81.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, GENet is up to 6.4 times faster than EfficienNet on GPU. It also outperforms most state-of-the-art models that are more efficient than EfficientNet in high precision regimes. Our source code and pre-trained models are available from https://github.com/idstcv/GPU-Efficient-Networks.

GPU kernel agents and GPU programming languages have advanced separately, leaving expert kernels difficult to reproduce. Agents usually treat the compiler as a fixed black box and receive only errors, correctness outcomes, and timing, while existing DSLs either hide critical scheduling decisions or expose them through difficult layout abstractions. We present CAKE, a compiler-agent co-design in which agents author CAKE IR, a typed, hardware-explicit schedule representation. CAKE exposes warp roles, memory movement, synchronization, and pipelines while supporting verification, cost modeling, and localized diagnostics. The harness itself evolves: recurring failures become verifier rules, IR primitives, model calibrations, and reusable optimization tactics. In matched implementation-hidden Flash-KMeans clean starts on B200, the best CAKE IR candidate at an 80-million-token budget runs at 1.144x the tuned FlashML baseline, compared with 0.928x for direct CUDA/PTX. Beyond this benchmark, agent-generated Kimi Delta Attention achieves a 2.05x geometric-mean speedup over official FlashKDA and passes end-to-end serving validation. Dispatcher-backed KNN and KMeans improve performance by 1.42x to 2.12x across more than 400 shapes, and four kernel changes are available as upstream PRs. CAKE targets NVIDIA GPUs from Ampere through Blackwell and separates single-shape evolution from library generalization and dispatch.

Recent advances in large language models have brought immense value to the world, with their superior capabilities stemming from the massive number of parameters they utilize. However, even the GPUs with the highest memory capacities, currently peaking at 80GB, are far from sufficient to accommodate these vast parameters and their associated optimizer states when conducting stochastic gradient descent-based optimization. One approach to hosting such huge models is to aggregate device memory from many GPUs. However, this approach introduces prohibitive costs for most academic researchers, who always have a limited budget for many high-end GPU servers. In this paper, we focus on huge model fine-tuning on a single, even low-end, GPU in a commodity server, which is accessible to most AI researchers. In such a scenario, the state-of-the-art work ZeRO-Infinity suffers from two severe issues when running in a commodity server: 1) low GPU utilization due to inefficient swapping, and 2) limited trainable model size due to CPU memory capacity. The underlying reason is that ZeRO-Infinity is optimized for running on high-end GPU servers. To this end, we present Fuyou, a low-cost training framework that enables efficient 100B huge model fine-tuning on a low-end server with a low-end GPU and limited CPU memory capacity. The key idea is to add the SSD-CPU communication as an optimization dimension and thus carefully co-optimize computation and data swapping from a systematic approach to maximize GPU utilization. The experimental results show that 1) Fuyou is able to fine-tune 175B GPT-3 on a consumer GPU RTX 4090 with high GPU utilization, while ZeRO-Infinity fails to fine-tune; and 2) when training a small GPT-3 13B model, Fuyou achieves 156 TFLOPS on an RTX 4090 GPU while ZeRO-Infinity only achieves 45 TFLOPS.

As agentic AI systems become increasingly capable of generating and optimizing GPU kernels, progress is constrained by benchmarks that reward speedup over software baselines rather than proximity to hardware-efficient execution. We present SOL-ExecBench, a benchmark of 235 CUDA kernel optimization problems extracted from 124 production and emerging AI models spanning language, diffusion, vision, audio, video, and hybrid architectures, targeting NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. The benchmark covers forward and backward workloads across BF16, FP8, and NVFP4, including kernels whose best performance is expected to rely on Blackwell-specific capabilities. Unlike prior benchmarks that evaluate kernels primarily relative to software implementations, SOL-ExecBench measures performance against analytically derived Speed-of-Light (SOL) bounds computed by SOLAR, our pipeline for deriving hardware-grounded SOL bounds, yielding a fixed target for hardware-efficient optimization. We report a SOL Score that quantifies how much of the gap between a release-defined scoring baseline and the hardware SOL bound a candidate kernel closes. To support robust evaluation of agentic optimizers, we additionally provide a sandboxed harness with GPU clock locking, L2 cache clearing, isolated subprocess execution, and static analysis based checks against common reward-hacking strategies. SOL-ExecBench reframes GPU kernel benchmarking from beating a mutable software baseline to closing the remaining gap to hardware Speed-of-Light.

Large matrix multiplication is a cornerstone of modern machine learning workloads, yet traditional approaches suffer from cubic computational complexity (e.g., O(n^3) for a matrix of size ntimes n). We present Low-Rank GEMM, a novel approach that leverages low-rank matrix approximations to achieve sub-quadratic complexity while maintaining hardware-accelerated performance through FP8 precision and intelligent kernel selection. On a NVIDIA RTX 4090, our implementation achieves up to 378 TFLOPS on matrices up to N=20480, providing 75\% memory savings and 7.8times speedup over PyTorch FP32 for large matrices. The system automatically adapts to hardware capabilities, selecting optimal decomposition methods (SVD, randomized SVD) and precision levels based on matrix characteristics and available accelerators. Comprehensive benchmarking on NVIDIA RTX 4090 demonstrates that Low-Rank GEMM becomes the fastest approach for matrices Ngeq10240, surpassing traditional cuBLAS implementations through memory bandwidth optimization rather than computational shortcuts.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled groundbreaking advancements across several domains and are commonly used for text generation applications. However, the computational demands of these complex models pose significant challenges, requiring efficient hardware acceleration. Benchmarking the performance of LLMs across diverse hardware platforms is crucial to understanding their scalability and throughput characteristics. We introduce LLM-Inference-Bench, a comprehensive benchmarking suite to evaluate the hardware inference performance of LLMs. We thoroughly analyze diverse hardware platforms, including GPUs from Nvidia and AMD and specialized AI accelerators, Intel Habana and SambaNova. Our evaluation includes several LLM inference frameworks and models from LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen families with 7B and 70B parameters. Our benchmarking results reveal the strengths and limitations of various models, hardware platforms, and inference frameworks. We provide an interactive dashboard to help identify configurations for optimal performance for a given hardware platform.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is increasingly popular for 3D reconstruction due to its superior visual quality and rendering speed. However, 3DGS training currently occurs on a single GPU, limiting its ability to handle high-resolution and large-scale 3D reconstruction tasks due to memory constraints. We introduce Grendel, a distributed system designed to partition 3DGS parameters and parallelize computation across multiple GPUs. As each Gaussian affects a small, dynamic subset of rendered pixels, Grendel employs sparse all-to-all communication to transfer the necessary Gaussians to pixel partitions and performs dynamic load balancing. Unlike existing 3DGS systems that train using one camera view image at a time, Grendel supports batched training with multiple views. We explore various optimization hyperparameter scaling strategies and find that a simple sqrt(batch size) scaling rule is highly effective. Evaluations using large-scale, high-resolution scenes show that Grendel enhances rendering quality by scaling up 3DGS parameters across multiple GPUs. On the Rubble dataset, we achieve a test PSNR of 27.28 by distributing 40.4 million Gaussians across 16 GPUs, compared to a PSNR of 26.28 using 11.2 million Gaussians on a single GPU. Grendel is an open-source project available at: https://github.com/nyu-systems/Grendel-GS

Large language model (LLM) decoding is latency-sensitive and often bottlenecked by fragmented operator execution and repeated off-chip materialization of intermediate tensors. Prior work expands fusion scope by leveraging thread-block clusters and on-chip inter-block collectives to fuse attention-side operators such as QKV projection, attention, and output projection. We develop ClusterFusion++, a CUDA-level extension that broadens fusion to the full Transformer decoder block for GPT-NeoX/Pythia models: LayerNorm -> QKV -> RoPE -> decode attention -> output projection -> Post-LN -> MLP -> residual. We additionally engineer a CUDA-Graph-compatible execution mode with persistent Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) descriptors to reduce per-step overhead. On an NVIDIA RTX 5090-class GPU, ClusterFusion++ improves throughput by 1.34x for Pythia-2.8B and yields similar gains for Pythia-6.9B, while maintaining high output fidelity (near-token-identical generation, with minor non-determinism from FP16 atomics).

GPU architectures have continued to grow in complexity, with recent incarnations introducing increasingly powerful fixed-function units for matrix multiplication and data movement to accompany highly parallel general-purpose cores. To fully leverage these machines, software must use sophisticated schedules that maximally utilize all hardware resources. Since realizing such schedules is complex, both programmers and compilers routinely employ program transformations, such as software pipelining (SWP) and warp specialization (WS), to do so in practice. However, determining how best to use SWP and WS in combination is a challenging problem that is currently handled through a mix of brittle compilation heuristics and fallible human intuition, with little insight into the space of solutions. To remedy this situation, we introduce a novel formulation of SWP and WS as a joint optimization problem that can be solved holistically by off-the-shelf constraint solvers. We reify our approach in Twill, the first system that automatically derives optimal SWP and WS schedules for a large class of iterative programs. Twill is heuristic-free, easily extensible to new GPU architectures, and guaranteed to produce optimal schedules. We show that Twill can rediscover, and thereby prove optimal, the SWP and WS schedules manually developed by experts for Flash Attention on both the NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPU architectures.

Federated Learning (FL) represents a paradigm shift in distributed machine learning (ML), enabling clients to train models collaboratively while keeping their raw data private. This paradigm shift from traditional centralized ML introduces challenges due to the non-iid (non-independent and identically distributed) nature of data across clients, significantly impacting FL's performance. Existing literature, predominantly model data heterogeneity by imposing label distribution skew across clients. In this paper, we show that label distribution skew fails to fully capture the real-world data heterogeneity among clients in computer vision tasks beyond classification. Subsequently, we demonstrate that current approaches overestimate FL's performance by relying on label/class distribution skew, exposing an overlooked gap in the literature. By utilizing pre-trained deep neural networks to extract task-specific data embeddings, we define task-specific data heterogeneity through the lens of each vision task and introduce a new level of data heterogeneity called embedding-based data heterogeneity. Our methodology involves clustering data points based on embeddings and distributing them among clients using the Dirichlet distribution. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the performance of different FL methods under our revamped notion of data heterogeneity, introducing new benchmark performance measures to the literature. We further unveil a series of open research directions that can be pursued.

Making deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) training and inference fast and efficient is important. However, this presents three key system challenges - model architecture diversity, kernel primitive diversity, and hardware generation and architecture heterogeneity. This paper presents KernelEvolve-an agentic kernel coding framework-to tackle heterogeneity at-scale for DLRM. KernelEvolve is designed to take kernel specifications as input and automate the process of kernel generation and optimization for recommendation model across heterogeneous hardware architectures. KernelEvolve does so by operating at multiple programming abstractions, from Triton and CuTe DSL to low-level hardware agnostic languages, spanning the full hardware-software optimization stack. The kernel optimization process is described as graph-based search with selection policy, universal operator, fitness function, and termination rule, dynamically adapts to runtime execution context through retrieval-augmented prompt synthesis. We designed, implemented, and deployed KernelEvolve to optimize a wide variety of production recommendation models across generations of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as Meta's AI accelerators. We validate KernelEvolve on the publicly-available KernelBench suite, achieving 100% pass rate on all 250 problems across three difficulty levels, and 160 PyTorch ATen operators across three heterogeneous hardware platforms, demonstrating 100% correctness. KernelEvolve reduces development time from weeks to hours and achieves substantial performance improvements over PyTorch baselines across diverse production use cases and for heterogeneous AI systems at-scale. Beyond performance efficiency improvements, KernelEvolve significantly mitigates the programmability barrier for new AI hardware by enabling automated kernel generation for in-house developed AI hardware.

The proliferation of probabilistic AI has promoted proposals for specialized stochastic computers. Despite promising efficiency gains, these proposals have failed to gain traction because they rely on fundamentally limited modeling techniques and exotic, unscalable hardware. In this work, we address these shortcomings by proposing an all-transistor probabilistic computer that implements powerful denoising models at the hardware level. A system-level analysis indicates that devices based on our architecture could achieve performance parity with GPUs on a simple image benchmark using approximately 10,000 times less energy.

Using fewer bits to represent model parameters and related tensors during pre-training has become a required technique for improving GPU efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Microscaling (MX) formats introduced in NVIDIA Blackwell generation of GPUs represent a major advancement of this technique, making it practical to combine narrow floating-point data types with finer granularity per-block scaling factors. In turn, this enables both quantization of more tensors than previous approaches and more efficient execution of operations on those tensors. Effective use of MX-formats requires careful choices of various parameters. In this paper we review these choices and show how MXFP8-E4M3 datatype and a specific number conversion algorithm result in training sessions that match those carried out in BF16. We present results using models with up to 8B parameters, trained on high-quality datasets of up to 15T tokens.