Papers for
gpu software developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Gpu techniques speed up turbulent flow simulations with mixed precision
Mixed-precision GPU algorithms for efficient turbulent flow simulations with Raviart-Thomas finite elements
Abstract: We propose GPU algorithms for high-fidelity simulation of incompressible turbulent flows. Discretization in space is performed with H(div)-conforming high-order Raviart-Thomas finite elements for the velocity and an $L^2$-conforming discontinuous Galerkin approximation for the pressure. In time, a consistent splitting scheme based on higher-order BDF time stepping is used, with convection treated explicitly. In this scheme, a pressure Poisson equation and a symmetric reaction-diffusion-type equation for the velocity need to be solved in each time step. We develop a solution framework with fast matrix-free operator evaluation for all ingredients, combined with multigrid solvers for the Poisson problem, and propose a robust mixed-precision algorithmic framework. A key to mixed-precision efficiency is a least-squares projection to generate accurate initial guesses for the iterative linear solvers, enabling us to work with relative residual tolerances of $10^{-3}$. In this regime, running the solvers entirely in single precision leads to almost no change in overall iteration counts and maintains the crucial turbulence statistics, while showing up to $1.7\times$ speedup over pure double-precision simulations.
Language model mimics brain neurons for efficient learning from small data
URCHIN: A Horizontal Spiking Language Model for Data-Constrained Pretraining
Abstract: The BabyLM challenge measures how much language a model can learn from developmentally-plausible, child-scale data rather than internet-scale corpora, yet prior language models forgo the biological constraints of the neural circuitry that acquires human language: spiking neurons separated into excitatory and inhibitory populations wired by a recurrent lateral connectome. This paper presents URCHIN (Unified Recurrent Connectome with Horizontal Integrate-and-fire Neurons), which applies the Parallelized Hierarchical Connectome Spiking State-space Model (PHCSSM) to language modeling: leaky integrate-and-fire neurons coupled by a Dale's-law lateral connectome resolve each token through a multi-transmission loop that recirculates activity to a fixed point. The instantiation is deliberately minimal: a single horizontal layer of 128 neurons, no attention, and 4.23M parameters. Two implementations share one set of weights and produce identical benchmark scores, so URCHIN is trained once and deployed either way with no conversion step: a parallel state-space model (SSM) scan that is GPU-efficient for training, or an event-driven recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN) with constant-cost inference for CPU or neuromorphic edge deployment. Across all three BabyLM tracks (Strict-100M, Strict-Small, and Multilingual), URCHIN offers a biologically plausible, efficient, and directly deployable reference point.
ForgeMegakernel speeds up model decoding with tailor-made GPU kernels
ForgeMegakernel: A General Framework for Efficient Auto-Regressive Model Decode Megakernels
Abstract: Auto-regressive model decode is bandwidth-bound, since every weight and key/value-cache byte crosses high-bandwidth memory once per token. A megakernel is an ideal solution, but existing automatic megakernel generation approaches cannot achieve both generalization across models and correctness guarantees. We present ForgeMegakernel, which generates a per-model high-performance decode megakernel using coding agents. ForgeMegakernel pairs a universal knowledge base of ten progressive milestones with an independent mid-state test oracle. The milestones provide the megakernel's structural properties: a fine-grained instruction stream for each SM, dependency counters replacing the global synchronization, and a shared-memory buffer pool for workload balance across SMs and greater parallelism. The test oracle derives the mid-states of the megakernel and checks the performance, error and precision during the generation process, guaranteeing a correct and trustworthy forged megakernel. We evaluated ForgeMegakernel on 14 representative decoding operations across eight model families spanning 0.6B-13B parameters. The generated megakernels achieved 50.5-85.9% MBU and geometric mean speedups of 1.21x over SGLang 0.5.18 and 1.54x over a megakernel compiler under identical configurations. Inside SGLang, evaluated on GSM8K with ragged prompts, all 14 megakernels decoded faster than the SGLang engine at comparable answer accuracy.
Gpu memory safety evaluated with new standardized benchmark suite
Towards Standardized Evaluation of GPU Memory Safety with GMSBench
Abstract: As GPUs become increasingly integral to high-performance computing and machine learning, ensuring memory safety in GPU programs has become crucial for reliable and secure execution. However, evaluating GPU memory safety techniques remains challenging due to the lack of comprehensive and standardized benchmarks. In this paper, we present GMSBench, a GPU memory safety benchmark designed to evaluate a broad range of memory safety violations across different GPU memory spaces and execution scenarios. GMSBench comprises 149 self-contained CUDA tests spanning spatial, temporal, and concurrency errors. The suite provides a standardized foundation for the evaluation and comparative analysis of GPU memory safety mechanisms and helps expose gaps in their detection coverage. We demonstrate the utility of GMSBench by evaluating Compute Sanitizer, a widely used GPU memory error detection tool across multiple GPU architectures.
RouteRelay cuts routing costs in transformer sparse attention models
RouteRelay: Event-Triggered Cross-Layer Route Reuse for Efficient Dynamic Sparse Attention
Abstract: Dynamic sparse attention reduces long-context prefill cost by routing each query chunk to a small set of key chunks at every Transformer layer. The sparse attention kernel avoids most token interactions, but the router still rebuilds a chunk--chunk score matrix layer after layer, even when the selected routes change little. We introduce RouteRelay, a router-agnostic method that reuses only route metadata across depth while continuing to compute attention with the current layer's queries, keys, and values. Anchor layers perform full routing. Intermediate layers rescore the previous top-$k$ route and a compact sentinel set of near-miss and randomly probed chunks. A query row is rerouted only when a sentinel challenges its weakest selected chunk. We give a top-$k$ stability condition, a probabilistic bound on missed challengers, and a row-selective GPU execution design. In a reproducible empirical evaluation, RouteRelay retains at least 99.99% route recall while rerouting 25.0%, 55.4%, and 78.2% of rows under low, moderate, and high cross-layer drift, respectively. Across routing scales, RouteRelay retains 100.0% recall while evaluating 38.4--51.6% of full-routing score pairs as the key-chunk count grows from 128 to 1024. Its unfused CPU execution remains slower than dense matrix multiplication, exposing row compaction and ledger updates as the main kernel-engineering targets.