Papers for
high performance computing teams
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.
Dobb optimizer speeds up local updates for large language models
Dobb: Shard-Local Preconditioning in Block-Diagonal Eigenbases
Abstract: Training language models whose parameters and optimizer state exceed a single node's memory requires sharding these tensors across devices. Under tensor parallelism (TP) or fully sharded data parallelism (FSDP), matrix-aware optimizers such as Muon introduce communication to perform global matrix operations across shards. We propose Dobb (Distributed Optimizer with Block-diagonal Eigenbases), a matrix-aware optimizer designed to compute updates locally within parameter shards. Dobb approximates the input-activation second moment with diagonal blocks and tracks a complete basis within each block. It projects momentum into these bases, applies sign normalization to the coefficients, and reconstructs the update. When each block lies within one shard under TP or FSDP, Dobb applies its matrix update locally, requiring no communication beyond data-parallel synchronization of the activation second moments. We benchmark Dobb against Dion, a distributed matrix-aware optimizer designed to retain the benefits of orthonormalized updates while reducing communication. On GPT-2 XL (1.56B parameters), Dobb with 16 blocks reaches a validation loss of 2.476, compared with 2.511 for Dion at rank fraction 1/16. Under FSDP on 32 H100 GPUs, Dobb reduces the amortized optimizer-call time from 124.1 ms for Dion to 9.2 ms.
Fast layout-aware communication reduces training delays on large gpu clusters
The Endgame of FSDP Communication: Layout-Aware Collectives on Copy Engines, RDMA, and NVSwitch
Abstract: Fully Sharded Data Parallelism (FSDP2) maintains parameters and gradients as per-parameter tensors, whereas its collective path operates on flat, rank-major buffers. Converting between these layouts copies all-gather outputs into parameter storage and packs gradients into full-group fp32 buffers. Layout conversion alone accounts for 6.4% of step time in Llama-3.1 70B training at 8K tokens per GPU. Communication kernels impose a second cost: a default NCCL reduce-scatter can slow a concurrent GEMM that would otherwise complete in a single wave by 69%. We present TIDE, a set of zero-copy collectives built on public NCCL 2.31+ APIs. TIDE preserves FSDP2's per-parameter storage and compute kernels while folding layout placement into collective addressing. TIDE-AG delivers shards directly to parameter storage using NVSwitch multicast and paced recursive-doubling RDMA, with no SMs used for transport or placement. TIDE-RS consumes per-parameter bf16 gradients directly and reduces them into fp32 shards (a mixed-precision mode that NCCL does not provide) using copy engines and short-lived thread blocks (CTAs) for node-local accumulation and NVSwitch for cross-node reduction. A two-phase pipeline separates gradient reads from network progress; Slot-Reuse optionally stages gradients in vacated all-gather slots. On 64 GPUs, TIDE reduces step time by up to 27.1% relative to Stock FSDP2 and 6.0% relative to FSDP2+SymmMem across Llama-3.1 70B, Wan2.2, and Qwen3-30B-A3B. It reduces reduce-scatter SM time by factors of 12.5-14.5 and cuts interference with concurrent compute by up to an order of magnitude. Its reduce-scatter buffer remains nearly constant from 16 to 64 GPUs at a fixed per-GPU output size, and its peak memory is up to 4.7 GiB below FSDP2+SymmMem's and, with Slot-Reuse on Wan2.2, below Stock FSDP2's.
Gpu kernel optimization improves by learning adaptive profiling strategies
Less is more: learning what to profile for GPU kernel optimization
Abstract: Large language models have recently shown strong potential for automatically optimizing GPU kernels, yet their effectiveness depends critically on the hardware information available to the kernel optimization model. Existing systems typically rely on predefined profiling strategies, leaving what to profile largely outside the optimization process. We show that effective profiling is not simply about collecting more information: increasing the number of profiling metrics does not monotonically improve kernel optimization, while the most useful profiling information varies across kernels. Our theoretical analysis further shows that, under such heterogeneous profiling utility, kernel-conditioned selection can outperform any single fixed profiling configuration. Motivated by this observation, we propose AutoProfiler, a feedback-driven framework for learning a deterministic profiling tree from optimization feedback. The tree is iteratively refined through REWRITE and SPLIT operations, with an LLM generating candidate modifications and empirical evaluation determining their acceptance. Once constructed, the tree quickly gathers the required profiling information for any kernel, allowing the LLM rewriter to be invoked only once. Experiments on KernelBench show that our approach improves kernel optimization over fixed profiling configurations under constrained profiling budgets. These results suggest that hardware profiling should evolve from static metric collection toward profiling reasoning, making profiling itself a new dimension for improving kernel optimization. The codes are available at https://github.com/Satissss/AutoProfiler.
JustGoal method speeds up AI training kernels without expert input
JustGoal: With Only a Goal, the AI Baseline Is Above the Expert Kernels
Abstract: A small number of GPU kernels often determines the efficiency of large language model training and inference. High-performance kernel development typically relies on expert knowledge through manual implementation, collaboration with general-purpose models, or specialized agents equipped with domain knowledge, evaluation methods, and search workflows. We investigate how much value this knowledge provides as foundation models become stronger. We introduce JustGoal, a goal-only baseline in which a general-purpose agent receives only the optimization objective and constraints, without kernel-specific infrastructure, knowledge bases, or predefined workflows, and builds its own evaluation loop. On NVIDIA B200 GPUs, JustGoal outperforms open-source libraries on 8 of 10 operators, achieving per-operator geometric mean speedups of 1.14x to 2.34x. It also surpasses the fastest publicly released specialized-agent kernel on 5 of 9 operators with available comparisons. In a controlled same-model comparison using Fable 5.1 on single shapes, the KDA-0.5 harness reaches 0.95x of JustGoal's performance, while single-mechanism ablations show no consistent benefit from domain knowledge or predefined workflows. These results indicate that specialized machinery should be justified by clear gains over a same-model, same-scope goal-only baseline and reevaluated whenever the foundation model changes.
Looped transformers improve reinforcement learning speed and accuracy
ScaleRLT: Exact Log-Probabilities and Fast Deferred Rollouts for Reinforcement Learning on Looped Transformers
Abstract: Looped language models such as Ouro reuse one block of layers several times per token. A rollout engine can batch the deeper loops of several response positions and run them only when a deep readout is due. This deferred schedule is fast, but the learner of an on-policy RL algorithm recomputes the sampled tokens' log-probabilities with a dense pass, and the two computations differ in floating point: in FP32 at 4096 tokens about 18% of the sampled tokens miss a $10^{-5}$ same-weight gate, and with bf16 weights nearly every token does. We use a hybrid learner log-probability, $\ell=\ell_{\mathrm{dense}}+\mathrm{sg}(\ell_{\mathrm{sched}}-\ell_{\mathrm{dense}})$, where $\mathrm{sg}$ denotes stop-gradient. Its value is a no-grad replay through the rollout's own schedule, and its gradient is the dense learner's. The replay reproduces the rollout bit for bit in all 167 FP32 and 28 bf16 real-weight cells we ran on three platforms, including rollouts whose batch shrinks at stop tokens, and the gradient has the same FP32 error as other dense implementations in all 102 pre-registered comparisons from 96 to 4096 tokens; the full GRPO loss of a training step matches a float64 reference to $3.1\times10^{-4}$. On one GPU, deferral raises rollout throughput by $1.47$ to $1.56\times$, and by $1.18$ to $1.54\times$ once every step runs from CUDA graphs, bit for bit. In a two-node GRPO loop, one-wave KV admission and CUDA graphs shorten an update by $2.71\times$ with the gate bitwise at every update, and four nodes keep the update time within 2% at the same per-GPU load. In 100-update runs held-out GSM8K accuracy rose from 23% to 82% with the mixed-depth readout that deferral relies on and from 34% to 90% with the native readout, which reached a higher accuracy in less time. For looped models beyond one node we analyse a ring mapping of layers to GPUs and measure its communication paths.
Scatter-gather model simplifies programming on mixed computer systems
SGL: Towards a Bridging Model for Heterogeneous Hierarchical Platforms
Abstract: This paper introduces the Scatter-Gather parallel-programming and parallel-execution model in the form of a simple imperative Scatter-Gather Language (SGL). Its design is based on past experience with bulk-synchronous parallel (BSP) programming and BSP language design. SGL's novel features are motivated by the last decade's move towards multi-level and heterogeneous parallel architectures involving multi-core processors, graphics accelerators and hierarchical routing networks in the largest multiprocessing systems. The design of SGL is coherent with L. Valiant's Multi-BSP while offering a programming interface that is even simpler than the primitives of Bulk-Synchronous Parallel ML (BSML). SGL appears to cover a large subset of all BSP algorithms while avoiding complex message-passing programming. Like all BSP-inspired systems, it supports predictable, portable and scalable performance. Moreover, SGL's explicit data distribution will allow automatic or programmable load-balancing.
Faster log-sum-exp computation speeds up AI on GPUs and CPUs
Speeding up Log-Sum-Exp: Kernel Fusion at the Memory Wall, Integer Arithmetic at the Compute Wall
Abstract: While the Log-Sum-Exp (LSE) function is a foundational numerical primitive for stable log-domain computation in modern machine learning, its fast and efficient computation on generic platforms (\ie, CPUs and GPUs) has been underexplored, potentially creating execution bottlenecks for large workloads. On GPU, the de facto implementation torch.logsumexp dispatches a chain of nine sub-kernels per call, incurring redundant High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) traffic and launch overhead. On CPU, exp and log operations are hardware-hungry, limiting the computing efficiency. To address these bottlenecks, we propose two drop-in kernels to significantly accelerate LSE computation on both GPUs and CPUs: FuseLSE, a single-pass fused kernel that evaluates LSE's exp and log functions on the GPU's Special Function Unit (SFU); and IntLSE, which further replaces the LSE computation with approximated integer arithmetic for CPU computation. Our experiments, validated by benchmarks across workload sizes and hardware platforms, show that both kernels are ${\sim}10-11\times$ faster than PyTorch at small workloads and ${\sim}6\times$ faster on larger ones on GPUs, where the speed-up is attributed to reduced launch overhead and HBM traffic. On CPU, where no SFU is available, LSE computation dominates the cost, allowing IntLSE to gain ${\sim}3-6\times$ execution speed over FuseLSE.
HyScale speeds up training for long-context sparse attention AI models
HyScale: Scaling Long-Context Training for Learned Sparse Attention
Abstract: We present HyScale, a long-context training system for learned sparse attention. Learned sparse attention is a promising architecture for million-token contexts, widely adopted in production since DeepSeek-V3.2. Selection, however, grows into the training bottleneck. For each query, it scores every previous token whereas sparse attention reads only $k$; worse, current systems materialize a full score table and repeat selection during recomputation. Our key insight is that the output of selection is not an activation, but rather a set of indices. Building on it, HyScale introduces HyTopK and selection replay. HyTopK finds each query's exact top-$k$ on the fly without a score table, while selection replay reuses forward-pass selection in recomputation. Together with holistic system optimizations tackling end-to-end training challenges, HyScale speeds up GLM-5.1 training on 1M-token sequences by 2.07$\times$ over Megatron-LM on 512 H20 GPUs. It also speeds up the CSA layers of DeepSeek-V4-Flash and the QSA layers of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next by 2.01$\times$ and 1.57$\times$ at 1M tokens on 32 H800 GPUs.
Gpu performance improved by controlling prefetch timing and placement
SnakeCharmer: Orchestrating Utility, Timeliness, and Placement in GPU Prefetching
Abstract: GPUs rely on massive thread-level parallelism to tolerate long memory latency, yet they still suffer severe stalls when many warps simultaneously wait for data from the memory system. Address-prediction-based GPU prefetchers can mitigate such stalls, but accurate prediction alone does not guarantee performance improvement: a predicted prefetch becomes beneficial only if it is worth issuing, arrives at the right time, and is retained without harmful interference. Because these requirements interact, optimizing any single dimension in isolation can simply move the bottleneck to another. We capture these requirements with a predicted-prefetch-to-realized-benefit perspective and propose SnakeCharmer, a unified backend prefetch-control framework for address-prediction-based GPU prefetchers. SnakeCharmer separates address prediction from prefetch realization: the frontend predictor generates prefetch candidates, while the backend control path jointly controls utility, timeliness, and placement by determining whether each candidate should be issued, when it should be issued, and where the returned data should be retained. SnakeCharmer realizes this control path with zero-value-aware filtering for utility, hierarchical feedback-driven distance tuning for timeliness, and a register-assisted prefetch buffer for placement. We design and implement SnakeCharmer primarily on top of Snake, and adapt the same backend-control principles to APOGEE to demonstrate that SnakeCharmer's benefits are not limited to a single frontend predictor. On an A100 GPU model, SnakeCharmer improves performance/energy efficiency by 12.8%/20.8% over Snake and by 1.7%/3.2% over APOGEE, with modest hardware overhead.
Asynchronous abc sampler improves efficiency for varied simulation workloads
Asynchronous, Generation-Free ABC: Streaming AMIS Reweighting for Heterogeneous Simulator Workloads on HPC
Abstract: Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) enables Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihoods by estimating parameter posterior distributions from simulated data. Sequential ABC methods improve sampling efficiency by iteratively adapting the proposal distribution toward regions of high posterior probability. However, these methods typically operate in generations, where each generation must wait for its slowest simulation before the next can begin. On a parallel machine, this synchronization barrier leaves workers idle and reduces throughput, particularly when simulation runtimes vary substantially. We introduce a generation-free ABC sampler that updates its proposal when simulation results arrive and sends a new candidate to each available worker. The proposal is based on the best particles evaluated so far. To estimate the posterior, we reuse the full history and reweight particles against a reconstructed mixture of sampling proposals. We show how errors in approximating the mixture of sampling proposals affect the estimated posterior and establish consistency for the smooth-ABC posterior when the approximation becomes asymptotically exact. In our experiments, the method achieves well-calibrated posterior estimates where a pyABC baseline with the same kernel and bandwidth schedule under-covers. From the asynchronous run's timing alone, we predict how much a synchronization barrier would slow the sampler. These predictions agree with measured synchronization penalties ranging from 1.2x to 400x. On a Cellular Potts tissue simulator, the asynchronous sampler completes 2.1-2.4x as many evaluations as pyABC in the same hour, and the discrepancy threshold for its best 100 evaluations is 4.1x smaller. With the starting bandwidth set from prior-predictive discrepancies, it also produces a more concentrated two-parameter posterior with a larger effective sample size than pyABC.
Quantum compiler settings chosen from top down boost performance fast
Turning Quantum Compiler Configuration Selection Upside Down: A Top-Down Paradigm
Abstract: Selecting an effective quantum compiler configuration requires coordinated decisions over both hardware targets and compiler settings, with the ultimate goal of improving circuit execution fidelity. Existing SOTA approaches typically decompose this problem into two sequential stages: a device is chosen first, after which compiler options are tuned on that device through RL-based search. This bottom-up strategy can be fundamentally limited by its initial device decision, since a poorly matched backend may constrain the best fidelity achievable regardless of how effectively later compiler options are optimized. In contrast to classical compiler tuning, where the search space is often prohibitively large, the configuration space of quantum compilers remains manageable enough to support exhaustive search. Consequently, rather than repeatedly searching from candidate configurations, one can derive reusable configuration knowledge from offline oracle results and apply it directly to new circuits. In this paper, we introduce a top-down configuration-selection paradigm and build QuOPTBench, an exhaustively searched benchmark containing oracle configurations for 268 quantum circuits. We first study whether LLMs can directly infer suitable configurations and evaluate ten representative LLMs. The results reveal that vanilla LLMs remain far from the oracle. We then employ an LLM to extract transferable rules from sampled circuits governing configuration selection. Using these rules together with predictors trained on the enumerated configuration data of the sampled circuits, we design QuTOP, a rule-guided ML framework that performs fast configuration selection without iterative online search. Across our evaluation, the distilled rules consistently strengthen LLM-based selection, while QuTOP provides the strongest overall balance between solution quality and selection latency among the baselines.
Quantum property estimation sped up by new parallel processing method
KrMM Recurrences: HPC-Enhanced Estimators for Nonlinear Classical Shadows
Abstract: While quantum technologies are rapidly evolving, near-term applications heavily rely on hybrid quantum-classical paradigms. Among these, the classical shadows framework has gained a lot of traction, not only for quantum information science, but also for the development and verification of quantum hardware. It allows to efficiently classically estimate many properties of quantum states from randomized measurements alone, a task that is otherwise intractable due to the destructive nature of measurements in quantum systems. There are, however, many properties of interest that are, due to their very problem formulation, not efficiently estimable. In this work, we identify a computational kernel occurring in estimators of polynomial functions, a class of problems that are in general computationally difficult to solve. We show that this structure allows a row-wise partition that, together with a custom SIMD vectorization, enables massive parallelization and can reduce the computational cost significantly. We show applicability and scalability of the approach on different tasks, and our results showcase that the approach allows high sequential throughput and close-to-ideal parallel scaling. The work thus provides a new way of identifying and exploiting structure in classical shadow estimators, resulting in practical advantages on inherently difficult problems.
SigmaTrace enables detailed monitoring of CPU and GPU RDMA communication
SigmaTrace: Library-Agnostic Observability for CPU/GPU-Initiated RDMA Communication
Abstract: RDMA networking enables low-latency, high-bandwidth communication on large systems. Despite its adoption, however, observability is lacking. Existing tools target specific communication libraries or only report aggregated data, missing per-operation behavior. The gap is widest for GPU-initiated networking, whose in-kernel RDMA operations are invisible to the host. We present SigmaTrace, a library-agnostic RDMA profiling framework providing fine-grained, per-operation visibility for CPU and GPU-initiated networking. It traces operations at the libibverbs/mlx5dv layers, the common denominator beneath communication libraries on InfiniBand and RoCE, and employs a low-overhead memory interposition technique that, to our knowledge, gives the first observability into GPU-initiated RDMA without source patching or binary instrumentation. Host-side tracing adds 1.3% overhead on NCCL AllReduce at 128 GPUs and under 2% on RCCL at 1024 GPUs. On a persistent-kernel BFS and Mixture-of-Experts inference, SigmaTrace exposes an in-kernel barrier spread and 2.13x inter-node traffic skew invisible to existing profilers.
Dram processing in memory speeds up computing without slowing cpu access
GUMPIM: Unitary and Malleable Memory for Processing-in-Memory with Guaranteed PIM Pages
Abstract: DRAM-based Processing-in-Memory (PIM) addresses the "memory wall" by executing computations directly inside main memory. However, memory interleaving and virtual memory limit contiguous data size visible to PIM units, constraining PIM task granularity. To mitigate this, existing PIM systems drastically isolate PIM memory or disable memory interleaving. These design choices, however, decrease the CPU memory bandwidth and introduce extra data transfer, leading to an additional "system memory wall" that must be resolved to realize PIM's full potential. In this work, we propose GUMPIM, a PIM system that allows interleaved CPU pages and non-interleaved PIM pages to coexist in a Unitary and Malleable memory space with Guaranteed PIM page allocation. GUMPIM enables zero-copy during PIM task offloading and maintains CPU memory bandwidth while ensuring low PIM offloading overhead. First, we propose a dual-track memory management mechanism consisting of independent page allocation and address translation for CPU and PIM pages. Second, we design GUMPIM interface hardware on PIM-enabled DRAMs to provide a dynamic address mapping for the different data layouts of CPU and PIM pages. Third, we propose a PIM-assisted page migration mechanism that transparently migrates pages while preserving CPU access bandwidth, thereby enabling guaranteed and accelerated PIM page allocation. GUMPIM requires no changes to commodity DRAM standards; all hardware modifications are limited to the DRAM side, ensuring full compatibility with existing CPUs and enabling immediate deployment on current HBMx- and LPDDRx-based PIM platforms. Our results show only <0.1% performance degradation for CPU workloads on GUMPIM. For PIM workloads, GUMPIM reduces memory allocation and CPU-part computation times by 2.7x and 4.93x, respectively, yielding an end-to-end 2.3x speedup over a state-of-the-art baseline system.
Memory-bound CFD runs faster and cheaper with smart AMD EPYC settings
Data-Driven Prediction of Optimal MPI Rank Placement and Node Count for Memory-Bound CFD on AMD EPYC Clusters
Abstract: Users who run a memory-bound OpenFOAM case on an AMD EPYC cluster must decide how many nodes to use and how many MPI ranks to place on each core complex. The fastest choice is often not the cheapest one. This paper revisits our earlier analytical model of this performance and energy trade-off with 560 measured configurations of the motorBike case on five Zen 4 and Zen 5 EPYC processors, including socket power from processor telemetry. On up to four nodes, small meshes are both fastest and cheapest on a single node on most processors. For the largest mesh the largest node count is both the fastest and the cheapest option, because its speedup is superlinear. A genuine trade-off arises only for medium meshes, where full speed costs a median of 20 to 97% more node hours than the cheapest option. The L3 miss rate and the halo traffic per cell are consistent with this pattern. For a new mesh of the same case, the configuration that was optimal on the nearest measured mesh is near optimal in 75 to 85% of the decisions. Running the two configurations it recommends for speed and for cost raises this share to 85 to 90% for runtime and node hours and determines the trade-off with median errors of 3 to 5 percentage points. Neither gradient boosted trees trained on the same data nor the earlier polynomial model improves on this simple procedure.
LeMA scales Levenberg-Marquardt training for billion parameter models
Scalable Levenberg-Marquardt Training Framework for Deep Learning
Abstract: The Levenberg-Marquardt (LMA) algorithm is a widely used nonlinear least-squares solver known for its rapid convergence. For small-scale neural networks, LMA provides better convergence and architectural robustness than first-order optimizers like Adam. However, LMA imposes prohibitive memory and computational costs. These costs are primarily from the Jacobian matrix, whose dimensions scale with both the number of samples and parameters. This bottleneck prevents its use in large-scale neural networks. Recent efforts scale LMA using preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) solvers to avoid materializing the Jacobian. However, PCG only approximates the solution, requiring many network propagations and a task-specific preconditioner. Other studies optimize LMA to reduce costs, but they restrict their methods to specific tasks or network architectures. As a result, LMA remains impractical for training general large-scale neural networks. In this paper, we propose LeMA, a distributed LMA algorithm for large-scale neural network training on multi-GPU platforms. Our contributions are twofold: First, an exact dual formulation of LMA removes the memory dependence on the parameter dimension. Second, a Jacobian sharding strategy computes Jacobian shards on the fly and in parallel to avoid materializing the full Jacobian. For large-scale neural networks, LeMA reduces the memory footprint of LMA from quadratic in the number of parameters to quadratic in the batch size. This makes exact LMA steps feasible for billion-parameter models without approximate PCG solves. Furthermore, for a convolutional neural network with 1,000,022,632 parameters on an 8-GPU node, LeMA achieves a 7.97x speedup over a single GPU, corresponding to a 99.7% strong scaling efficiency.
ForTress brings certainty to Fortran to Python code translation
ForTress: Bringing Assurance and Determinism for LLM-Driven Fortran-to-Python Translation
Abstract: Modernizing mature scientific software from Fortran to Python can improve accessibility and integration with modern computing tools, but manual rewriting is expensive. Large language models (LLMs) make translation more practical, yet generated code can pass regression tests while violating source-language semantics, and contextual corrections may not persist across subsequent translations. We present ForTress, which solidifies recurring LLM translation decisions into guarded executable rules for deterministic reuse and provides semantic assurance for a non-trivial subset of these rules. Its LLM-assisted auditing process expresses universally quantified preservation obligations over mechanized Fortran and Python semantics in Lean. Human experts review semantic fidelity and correspondence with production rules, and Lean's kernel checks proofs and refutations under explicit assumptions. These audit records expose the conditions either supporting correctness or identifying failure cases. We evaluate ForTress on 17 benchmarks from 15 scientific software spanning diverse domains. The translated programs achieve bitwise-identical with native Fortran on all evaluated tests under the recorded execution and initialization configurations. Against these software, ForTress accumulates 193 executable rules and 188 audit records, of which 121 have checked soundness proofs, including 31 established after counterexample-guided refinement. Cross-software reuse exceeds 90% for 14 of the 15 software. Even with additional assurance and determinism, the LLM usage cost is 44.2% lower than direct LLM translation.
Helix FPGA accelerator speeds up diverse Krylov solvers with low overhead
Helix: A Unified Programmable Accelerator for Diverse Krylov Subspace Solvers
Abstract: Domain-specific accelerators deliver high performance and energy efficiency through specialization but often lack support for extensible algorithm families. Existing FPGA accelerators for Krylov subspace methods, which iteratively solve sparse linear systems, typically support a single solver or require separate hardware configurations. Helix follows a systematic algorithm-family design methodology that first abstracts common computational primitives from diverse Krylov solvers and builds the architecture around efficient, programmable primitive kernels. Helix then introduces programmable datapaths to coordinate these primitives. Its architecture decouples hardware implementation from solver-specific execution, enabling HBM reuse and zero solver-switching latency. Finally, Helix provides a DSL compiler that efficiently maps different solvers onto the architecture while optimizing vector-operation performance for each solver. We prototype Helix on a Xilinx Alveo U55C FPGA and evaluate Helix's practicality and performance by using it to compile and execute eight solvers. Helix achieves up to 7.91x and 1.16x speedups over Xilinx XcgSolver and the state-of-the-art FPGA accelerator Callipepla, respectively, both of which support only JPCG. Across the eight solvers, Helix sustains 47.5% - 96.9% of the throughput of an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU while delivering 2.29x - 4.66x higher energy efficiency and 1.89x - 3.85x higher throughput per unit peak memory bandwidth. The programmable components incur 0.25% - 0.57% execution-time overhead and 4.7% LUT and 4.0% FF overhead, demonstrating negligible overhead for programmability.
Cyclotron compiles streaming algorithms into efficient distributed processor programs
Cyclotron: A Recurrence Language for Expressing Interprocessor Communication
Abstract: We present Cyclotron, a compiler that expresses streaming dataflow algorithms using recurrence equations, which are then compiled to distributed topologies of interlinked processors. Our compiler lowers a language of recurrences over logical iteration spaces into per-processor programs of sends, receives, and computations. In these recurrences, data accesses are not limited to external accesses to memory; data can live separately on the iteration space itself, allowing internal points to communicate values directly with other points. Users specify this communication directly in the recurrence language, which allows them to express various communication patterns such as a nearest-neighbor systolic exchange, a one-to-all broadcast, a bidirectional split ring, or an asymmetric and piecewise broadcast pattern, which are often not supported by standard distributed linear algebra libraries. These recurrences describe the algorithm and communication independently of how they map onto the hardware. A programmer then chooses which dimensions execute across processors and which execute over time, without rewriting the entire program. Users only specify data dependencies across the iteration space, and the compiler safely generates a program, per process, with correct placement of both communication and computational operators according to the chosen space--time mapping. We evaluate distributed matrix multiplication, TRSM, Cholesky, and fused Cholesky--TRSM on up to 16 CPU nodes and 16 GPUs, comparing against ScaLAPACK, SLATE, and cuSolverMp. Cyclotron is competitive with and often outperforms these hand-optimized libraries; for Cholesky, the best communication strategy changes with problem size and architecture.
NVIDIA Grace Blackwell memory performance varies with placement and use
Understanding NVIDIA Grace-Blackwell Unified Memory Through Placement-Controlled Microbenchmarks
Abstract: NVIDIA Grace--Blackwell systems make CPU--GPU memory increasingly unified at the programming level, but unified addressability does not make the memory system uniform. A CUDA managed allocation on GB200 may be served from GPU-local HBM, accessed through host/system memory, demand-migrated, prefetched, reused after GPU access, or evicted and reloaded under capacity pressure. The problem is that these states share a programming interface while exercising different hardware paths and runtime mechanisms, making a single ``Unified Memory bandwidth'' number misleading. This paper presents a placement-controlled microbenchmark study of CUDA Unified Memory on NVIDIA GB200, using GH200 as a Grace--Hopper baseline and GB10/DGX Spark as a validation platform. Our methodology separates local HBM access, host/system-memory access, explicit movement, managed first touch, prefetch, reuse, access-pattern sensitivity, oversubscription, and CPU--GPU handoff, then summarizes the observations with a measurement-calibrated model of compute, access, migration, eviction, synchronization, and handoff costs. On GB200, a 1~GB STREAM-style triad reaches 3963~GB/s from local HBM but 304~GB/s through host-mapped CPU/system memory; for a 256~MB streaming kernel, cold CPU-initialized managed memory reaches 14.1~GB/s, while managed prefetch and reuse reach 4606~GB/s and 4504~GB/s. Below the capacity boundary, prefetched and reused managed memory remain above 4.6~TB/s, but at 125\% of CUDA-visible memory they fall to 968~GB/s and 1214~GB/s, showing that Grace--Blackwell unified memory must be understood through placement, access history, locality, reuse, and capacity pressure.
Multi-GPU communication improved with clear memory rules in device APIs
A New Lens on Multi-GPU Communication: API-Level Memory Models for Portable Optimization
Abstract: As network communication increasingly becomes a performance bottleneck for ML and HPC workloads, it is more important than ever to optimize multi-GPU data transfers. Recently, low-level device APIs have emerged that allow programmers to perform fine-grain optimizations via one-sided put/get operations triggered directly from the device. However, the communication libraries providing these device APIs (e.g., rocSHMEM, MSCCL++, and NCCL/RCCL GIN) currently lack a rigorous memory model defining how their primitives interact with the underlying memory systems. Without this, emerging HPC and ML workloads aggressively optimizing network communication via device APIs can be brittle, error-prone, and face compatibility and inter-operability challenges. This paper proposes the use of API-level memory models for these emerging device communication APIs. An API-level memory model defines the memory semantics of communication API calls in a way that abstracts lower-level details from the API user and simplifies development. This work defines one such model for device-side communication (implemented in AMD's recently open sourced rocSHMEM library) and demonstrates how formal relaxations to such a model can enable low-level LLM performance optimizations while retaining a well-defined standardized interface. Specifically, we describe how updating the SHMEM API implemented by rocSHMEM can properly support cache bypassing for network data, improving performance of a collective communication workload by up to 2.48x, a fused compute+communication workload by up to 1.77x, and a state-of-the-art expert-parallel communication workload by up to 1.18x.
Multi gpu apps run faster without cpu control overhead
Multi-GPU Communication Schemes for Iterative Solvers: When CPUs are Not in Charge
Abstract: This paper proposes a fully autonomous execution model for multi-GPU applications that completely excludes the involvement of the CPU beyond the initial kernel launch. In a typical multi-GPU application, the host serves as the orchestrator of execution by directly launching kernels, issuing communication calls, and acting as a synchronizer for devices. We argue that this orchestration, or control flow path, causes undue overhead and can be delegated entirely to devices to improve performance in applications that require communication among peers. For the proposed CPU-free execution model, we leverage existing techniques such as persistent kernels, thread block specialization, device-side barriers, and device-initiated communication routines to write fully autonomous multi-GPU code and achieve significantly reduced communication overheads. We demonstrate our proposed model on two broadly used iterative solvers, 2D/3D Jacobi stencil and Conjugate Gradient(CG). Compared to the CPU-controlled baselines, the CPU-free model can improve 3D stencil communication latency by 58.8% and provide a 1.63x speedup for CG on 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The project code is available at https://github.com/ParCoreLab/CPU-Free-model.
CPU GPU memory sharing improved with portable efficient library
Characterizing CPU-GPU Memory Sharing over Unified Memory Architecture
Abstract: Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) enables the CPU and GPU to share a single physical memory. However, its complexity and opacity often drive applications back to inefficient copying or to incorrect direct access that sacrifices performance or even correctness. This paper presents a comprehensive study of CPU-GPU memory sharing on UMA, covering correctness and performance across data-plane transmission and control-plane coordination on four platforms. It yields four findings that guide libumsh, a portable library that delivers correct and efficient memory sharing across platforms and extends to emerging ones (e.g., NVIDIA DGX Spark). Applied to nine real-world systems, libumsh reduces data-plane time by 16-75% and control-plane overhead by 7-90%.
FPGA accelerator speeds up sparse matrix calculations with efficient memory use
SUSpMV: A High Frequency Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplier on HBM Enabled FPGA written in SUS
Abstract: SUSpMV is a Sparse Matrix Vector multiplication (SpMV) accelerator written in the upcoming HDL SUS. By leveraging SUS's unique latency counting and inference mechanism, SUSpMV could be designed with very deep pipelines yet small design complexity overhead. This enables an efficient implementation which employs all 32 HBM channels on the Alveo U280 FPGA at 400MHz for streaming matrix data into 32 Compute Units (CUs). Input and output vectors are stored in DDR memory, which allows zero-overhead chaining of multiplications and increases overall system memory bandwidth by not sharing HBM bandwidth with the CUs. A CU processes the SpMV in tiles of width 1024 and a dynamically chosen height, up to 32768. Each CU is capable of accumulating the multiplications with up to 6 separate matrix entries per cycle, resulting in the combined theoretical peak computational throughput of 153.6 GFLOPs. The matrix storage format is designed to exploit density variation within a given matrix by dynamically switching between one representation optimized for denser regions, and a second optimized for sparser regions, allowing jumps of up to 255 rows between each entry. Evaluation demonstrates a 79% geometric mean improvement over prior work on the same platform. We achieve a peak throughput of 144.9 GFLOPs, or 94% of our theoretical computational throughput, compared to 98 GFLOPs reached by prior work.
Kokkos software runs lattice gauge simulations efficiently on diverse supercomputers
Performance Portable $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ Lattice Gauge Theory Simulation with Kokkos
Abstract: The increasing diversity of high performance computing systems makes separate, architecture specific implementations of lattice gauge theory algorithms costly to maintain. We present \texttt{kwqft}, a performance portable Kokkos implementation of Wilson pure gauge Monte Carlo simulation for $\mathrm{SU}(N)$ Yang-Mills theory in an arbitrary number of space-time dimensions. The gauge group order $N$ and the dimension $D$ are compile time parameters. A single source targets the Serial, OpenMP, CUDA, HIP, and SYCL execution spaces, with MPI halo exchange overlapped with interior updates. The implementation reproduces the exact two-dimensional plaquette and published three and four dimensional values for gauge groups up to $\mathrm{SU}(17)$. On an NVIDIA A100 the Kokkos CUDA backend is competitive with a native CUDA code, SIMD acceleration improves the OpenMP path on Armv9 processors, and a large scale speedup is demonstrated for an $\mathrm{SU}(4)$ lattice on the LineShine supercomputer, currently ranked first on the TOP500 list.
Communication aware qubit placement improves distributed quantum simulation speed
Communication-Aware Qubit Placement and Automatic Node-Count Allocation for Distributed State-Vector Simulation
Abstract: Distributed quantum circuit simulation enables the execution of large-scale quantum algorithms by partitioning qubits across multiple computational nodes. However, inefficient qubit placement frequently leads to excessive inter-node communication, severely limiting performance and scalability. This work introduces a communication-aware qubit layout optimization framework that systematically minimizes data exchange among nodes while dynamically selecting the optimal number of computational resources. Integrated into the QuCSLO library, our approach supports dynamic node scaling, OpenQASM parsing, and seamless integration with the QuEST simulator. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world QASMBench circuits demonstrate that optimized layouts significantly reduce communication cuts and yield runtime speedups of over 2x compared to identity layouts, particularly in highly entangled circuits. Our results underscore the critical impact of strategic qubit placement on distributed simulation efficiency and provide a practical, resource-scalable solution for quantum workloads.
Multi-node LLM training scales down GPUs using CPU memory extension
TRANSIT: Transparent Scale-in for Multi-Node LLM Training
Abstract: TRANSIT is a transparent scale-in framework to enable multi-node model training on fewer GPUs while maintaining training efficiency by transparently leveraging CPU DRAM as an extension of GPU memory during distributed training. It achieves this through a user-space interposition layer, requiring no modifications to the application, training framework, cluster scheduler, device driver, or operating system. Furthermore, TRANSIT achieves higher efficiency by leveraging a zero-copy data path for CPU-GPU transfers. We evaluate TRANSIT on dense and MoE models across scales up to 64 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and multiple parallelism configurations over a RoCE network. Our evaluation shows that TRANSIT can: (a) outperform state-of-the-art framework-managed offloading techniques, achieving up to 68%, 59%, and 42% higher per-GPU throughput than TorchTitan, ZeRO-Offload, and ZeRO-Infinity, respectively, (b) enables training with 50% fewer GPUs while maintaining over 90% of baseline per-GPU throughput, (c) lower per-node network traffic by up to 33%, and (d) improve per-GPU throughput by up to 35% in communication-bound settings.
Numerical linear algebra methods explain large language model techniques
The Numerical Linear Algebra of Large Language Models
Abstract: Numerical Linear Algebra (NLA) has consistently played a vital role in advancing science by providing tools to solve fundamental problems encountered in scientific and engineering applications. Over the decades, it has continually evolved to meet the demands driven by successive waves of scientific discovery. For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, substantial efforts were devoted to developing methods for solving eigenvalue problems that emerged from the rapidly growing field of aerodynamics. This led to the discovery of the LR and QR algorithms. Later the attention turned to the solution of sparse linear systems that were common in applications like computational aerodynamics. Today we are experiencing yet another wave of major scientific advancement and NLA is once more at the heart of its development. This Machine Learning (ML) wave is proving to be utterly disruptive in science and engineering. Many tools in ML particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in matrix and tensor methods. As we are approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it is clear that matrix methods will be called to play an even more significant role. For the numerical linear practitioner the speed of the current change makes it particularly challenging to adapt. This is a survey article that centers on machine learning techniques, with a particular focus on large language models. It has two main objectives. The first is to clarify the core concepts behind Large Language Models in a manner accessible to specialists in numerical methods. The second is to examine the key Numerical Linear Algebra concepts employed by LLM techniques, while also highlighting several significant recent contributions of NLA to the field.
Machine shape predictions match real hardware for power time and energy
Closing the Prediction Gap: Completing Machine Shape So That Predicted Time, Power, Energy, and Mapping Match What Real Hardware Does
Abstract: A companion paper derives a weighted, communication free partition for heterogeneous, multi institution device ensembles from each device measured shape, rho_machine(d), validated on real hardware. Its experiments show rho_machine is incomplete: fp32 to fp16 speedup and power shifts are not fully indexed, and memory capacity predictions rely on an assumed, not measured, reservation overhead. This paper closes that gap, indexing five unmeasured fields in the psi selection vocabulary: memory capacity $M_i^{cap}$, power draw $P_i$, execution unit capability $X_d$, compiler directive configuration $C_d$, and memory reservation overhead $R_d$. We introduce reached(d), a Boolean for whether compiled code dispatches to specialized hardware, explaining the NVIDIA fp16 power shift that hardware availability alone cannot predict. MoA fixes a computation independently of its target, so compiler directives get a two part admissibility criterion: select a real hardware quantity without discretionary reordering, and be deterministic, not compiler overridable. Across Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, OpenMP, OpenACC, and Open MPI, this admits only cache placement controls, deterministic vector or tile widths, and occupancy caps; heuristics like autotuning are excluded and absorbed into a residual epsilon$(k)_d$. We validate on five devices: A100, H100, V100, MI100, and Max 1550, measuring or establishing all five fields on each. Reachability proves real but partial, occupancy limits are device specific, and reservation overhead ranges about 0.004 to 0.030. A residual of negative 9.8 percent for the excluded Triton autotuner shows an unvalidated heuristic can act opposite a presumed penalty. These results close all five fields for every device in the companion ensemble, converting assumed behavior into measured, target specific quantities.
Reinforcement learning improves parallel processing of sparse matrices
Reinforcement Learning-Guided Graph Transformations for SpTRSV Optimization
Abstract: Sparse triangular solve (SpTRSV) is a fundamental kernel in numerous scientific and engineering applications. However, the data dependencies inherent in sparse triangular matrices significantly limit the available parallelism and make efficient workload distribution challenging. Recent graph transformation techniques address these limitations by modifying the dependency graph of the input matrix to improve parallel execution. Existing graph transformation strategies, however, rely on manually designed heuristics, making their development and adaptation to different optimization objectives challenging. This work proposes a reinforcement learning-guided graph transformation framework for SpTRSV, in which graph transformation is formulated as a sequential decision-making problem and an RL agent learns matrix-dependent transformation policies. Experimental results on real-world sparse matrices demonstrate level reductions of up to 94% and reductions of up to 80% in the coefficient of variation of level costs, while modifying only 1.50% of the rows in the highest case. On average, the RL- guided graph transformation achieves a 23% reduction in the number of levels and a 29% reduction in the coefficient of variation of level costs while rewriting only 0.82% of the matrix rows. Although the heuristic strategies generally achieve more aggressive level reduction(between 31% and 46%), the RL-based approach achieves the largest average reduction in the coefficient of variation of level costs, demonstrating its ability to balance competing graph transformation objectives. The results further show that the learned policies can be transferred to previously unseen matrices through curriculum learning and fine-tuning, while zero-shot experiments provide insights into the limitations of generalizing graph transformation policies across different sparsity patterns.
Near data strands speed up loops without software changes
NDS: Programmer-Free Offload of High-Performance Near Data Strands
Abstract: Near Data Processing (NDP) has the potential to significantly improve system performance and energy by alleviating data movement bottlenecks. However, most NDP proposals pose heavy requirements for the software stack, data layout, and/or the underlying hardware. To broaden NDP adoption, this work focuses on a modular hardware-centric approach that automates the above steps and can target unmodified binaries. This paper presents Near Data Strands (NDS), a framework that orchestrates tasks and data automatically without involving the programmer and the software stack. As a first step towards this ambitious goal, this work focuses on regular loops that meet specific criteria. The framework identifies potential offloadable loops, decomposes them into parallel execution strands, creates a high performance instruction schedule, performs the required data marshaling and orchestration, and initiates near-data execution. We demonstrate that NDS achieves a 3.14x geomean speedup over a single-core host baseline and a 1.82x geomean speedup over 8-core host-parallel variants, all without any modifications to the software stack. These gains grow as repeated loop invocations amortize offload costs, showing that legacy applications can leverage a transparent hardware approach to extract benefits from NDP.
Rlx combines machine learning compilation and runtime across devices
RLX: A Unified Multi-Backend Tensor Compiler and Distributed Runtime in Rust
Abstract: Production machine learning (ML) stacks often split graph compilation and kernel execution across different layers and languages, making backend behavior, deployment guarantees, and performance fallbacks hard to reason about end-to-end. RLX addresses this gap with a single Rust codebase that combines compiler and runtime roles around one primitive-level, three-level intermediate representation (IR), plus a transparent dispatch contract that resolves each operator to native, common-IR, or rewritten lowering and fails compilation when legalization is not possible. The same IR targets fourteen runtime devices (cpu, metal, mlx, ane, cuda, rocm, oneapi, tpu, hexagon, gpu, vulkan, opengl, directx, webgpu) and two specialty codegen paths (Cortex-M INT8 and FPGA), ingests safetensors, GGUF, ONNX, and rten formats, supports F16/BF16/F64/C64 and quantized INT4/INT8 flows with AMP/PTQ/QAT, and scales via tensor-/pipeline-parallel collectives over TCP and RDMA transports. Beyond neural workloads, RLX also extends to scientific/physics-style domains through sparse and dense linear algebra extensions (e.g., CSR LU/CG/matvec and LAPACK- backed factorizations) and 3D Gaussian splatting operators. We evaluate RLX against PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, candle, burn, tch, rten, MLX, CoreML, IREE, Glow, TensorRT, and tinygrad under identical input generation and p50 measurement methodology on one host. On all-MiniLM-L6-v2, RLX-Metal is fastest at every batch (e.g., 16.6 ms at batch 32 vs. PyTorch-MPS 26.7 ms). In the MNIST training table, RLX also has the top-throughput entry (graph-fused MLP: 946,487 img/s), above NumPy+BLAS (787,349 img/s), while retaining 100% top-1 parity on reference checks (e.g., Qwen3).
Pearl boosts agentic reinforcement learning throughput by resource adaptation
PEARL: Adaptive Prefill-Decode Execution with Elasticity for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: Multi-turn rollout dominates the cost of agentic reinforcement learning (RL). Asynchronous execution and elastic GPU resources can accelerate this stage, but adding rollout replicas yields diminishing returns while training GPUs remain idle between updates. We observe that effective resource use also depends on the prefill--decode (PD) configuration. Both the choice between colocation and disaggregation and the optimal PD ratio vary with the workload, making resource scaling and PD configuration interdependent. Exploiting this opportunity requires selecting effective configurations and realizing their benefits within transient resource-availability windows despite reconfiguration costs. We present PEARL, an asynchronous agentic RL system that coordinates external resource elasticity, temporary reuse of idle training GPUs, and adaptive PD execution. PEARL maintains a unified GPU--worker--role state and uses runtime profiles to predict rollout batch completion time, accounting for environment-induced reductions in decode concurrency. It selects the PD mode and ratio under the current GPU budget and translates each decision into an incremental transition plan that minimizes worker and role changes. Cost-aware switching and borrowing policies suppress transitions with insufficient expected benefit while ensuring timely return of training GPUs. Our evaluation show that PEARL achieves $2.17$--$2.79\times$ the throughput of fixed-resource ROLL across different LLMs. Compared with RLBoost+, throughput improves by up to approximately 26.9\% for Qwen3-8B and 36.3\% for Qwen3-30B-A3B.
Fast open source backend accelerates equivariant operations on gpu and tpu
E3J: An Efficient and Open-Source Backend for Euclidean Equivariant Operations on GPU and TPU
Abstract: We present e3j, a fast Euclid-equivariance backend for geometric deep learning applications with JAX bindings for GPU and TPU. Leveraging both optimized CUDA and Pallas kernels and algorithmic improvements, the library achieves state-of-the-art throughput and runtime on both forward and backward paths. On a machine learning interatomic potential (MLIP) use case, it outperforms established backends, measuring up to 34% speed-up over cuEquivariance on water box NPT simulation using MACE, while remaining fully open source. E3j achieves over 80% efficiency over the H100 maximum memory bandwidth on tensor product operations, and in many cases more than doubles throughput of message passing convolutions forward compared to previously available backends. In addition, with the release of dedicated Pallas TPU kernel, e3j opens the possibility of large scale equivariant deep learning workloads on TPU architectures, which has so far been difficult to achieve. Our benchmarks show that e3j also achieves over 80% of a TPUv6e memory bandwidth, up to one order of magnitude more than e3nn-jax. The library is available on GitHub, PyPI and is released under an open source Apache 2.0 license.
Certificate-driven method boosts scientific code porting and speed
Towards Certificate-Driven Software Porting: A Self-Improving Agentic Harness for Scientific Program Optimization
Abstract: The upgrade and rewriting of large scientific codebases has traditionally been a major challenge. While evolutionary search with large language models (LLMs) can port and accelerate legacy code, repair feedback in prompts alone does not prevent subsequent candidates from repeating the same errors. We introduce Certificate-Driven Evolutionary Search (CDES), which extends evolutionary search with enforceable restrictions derived from failed candidates, recorded as certificates of assumptions, checker evidence, and justified restrictions. Its control logic enforces these restrictions through rejection, backtracking, and targeted repair while preserving compatible edits. We apply CDES to CPU-to-GPU translation of two particle-simulation functions from the Geant4 toolkit, evaluated with a harness that goes beyond unit tests to combine formal checks, numerical comparisons, physics checks, and GPU safety tests. Generated implementations achieve 13.78x and 23.54x function-level speedups over CPU code, including data conversion and transfers; for one function, GPU throughput exceeds an expert implementation by 14.9%, reaching 16.1% when complementary components are combined. In an ablation over execution settings, certificate feedback increases the fraction of candidates passing required correctness checks from 55% to 90%.
Cryogenic memory achieves low energy writes with voltage control devices
JFS-CryoMem: A Cryogenic Memory with Voltage-Controlled Superconducting Devices and Femtojoule-Scale Write/Read Energies
Abstract: Scalable cryogenic systems require memory that combines nonvolatile storage, selective access, low thermal disturbance, and compatibility with superconducting electronics. We present a cryogenic memory architecture that integrates a voltage-controlled Josephson junction field-effect transistor (JJFET) selector with a ferroelectric superconducting quantum interference device (FeSQUID) storage element, hereafter termed JFS-CryoMem. The JJFET provides gate-controlled cell selection, whereas the FeSQUID stores information in stable remanent-polarization states. JFS-CryoMem features separate read and write path mechanisms that support nondestructive readout and independent optimization of programming and sensing conditions. The architecture is evaluated using experimentally calibrated compact models that reproduce the measured electrical characteristics of both constituent devices. We demonstrate selective programming using a half-bias scheme, nonvolatile state retention, and distinguishable readout in a $4 \times 4$ array while accounting for the selected cell and all unselected parallel branches. We then extend the analysis to arrays up to $16 \times 16$ and examine how array scaling alters current distribution, column-equivalent resistance, readout separation, required bitline current, and read energy. The results reveal the principal sensing and energy tradeoffs associated with larger arrays and identify the operating conditions required to preserve read distinguishability as the array grows. JFS-CryoMem provides a device-to-array framework for cryogenic memory in quantum, high-performance, and space-oriented computing systems.
IceCube switches data system to Pelican platform improving performance
IceCube Takes Flight with Pelican - A First Experience
Abstract: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has removed GridFTP and x.509 certificate authentication for data transfers, migrating to the Pelican Platform, the Open Science Data Federation, and WLGC tokens. While this is a common solution on the computing infrastructure we use, we required several customizations to work with our existing data storage structure and make it easier for scientists to use. We wrote a custom WLCG token issuer to support our POSIX filesystem with custom user and group permissions across the entire filesystem. We also made several modifications to HTCondor to ease job submission using tokens, including a custom credmon. After an initially bumpy transition due to several now-resolved Pelican issues, the Pelican-based system has already proven superior to GridFTP in several ways.
Unified reinforcement learning improves quantum compilation and scheduling
MQSS-Selector: RL-Guided Pass Selection for an MLIR Compilation Pipeline
Abstract: High Performance Computing (HPC) and Quantum Computing (QC) systems are increasingly converging towards unified High Performance Computing-Quantum Computing (HPCQC) infrastructures, driven by a growing need to bridge classical and quantum workflows, which affects all levels of the system stack, from the hardware to compilers and runtimes, all the way to applications. However, today's QC devices are still in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, are error-prone and resource-limited, and therefore require specialized optimizations and topology mappings to achieve sufficient fidelity. This places special emphasis on proper compilation and optimization within the overall quantum software stack. Many existing stacks remain fragmented, with separate components responsible for device selection, compiler-pass optimization, and job queue scheduling. This paper proposes a unified, learning-based selector that integrates these disparate stages into a cohesive framework. Our proposed selector scheme leverages reinforcement learning and deep learning models that can be extended to simultaneously optimize multiple objectives -- such as fidelity, compilation time, and scheduling latency -- while dynamically adapting to circuit characteristics and device conditions.
Whole brain simulator runs 100 trillion synapses on supercomputer
CerebroSim: Scalable Whole-Brain Simulator at 100-Trillion-Synapse Scale on the LineShine Supercomputer
Abstract: Building executable brain models is essential for moving neuroscience from description to mechanism and prediction. Human-brain-scale spiking simulation is constrained by highly irregular communication, multithreaded spike delivery, and the memory cost of sparse connectivity. We present CerebroSim, a scalable framework for whole-brain simulation. CerebroSim combines Delay-aware Spike Broadcast (DSB) for aggregated delay-aware communication, Race-free Synaptic Dynamics Computation (RSDC) for lock/atomic-free multithreaded delivery with HBM-aware optimization, and Sparse Synapse Storage Compression (3SC) for compact indexing with deterministic synapse regeneration. Using a model derived from magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion-weighted imaging, CerebroSim simulates 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses on 18,432 nodes across 11.2 million cores of the LineShine Supercomputer, sustaining 24.44 PFlop/s, 91% weak-scaling efficiency, and 94% strong-scaling efficiency. This capability makes biologically constrained human-brain models practical for mechanistic studies of brain disorders and controlled in silico testing of intervention hypotheses.
Flux schedules optical switches to speed up AI model training
Flux: Optimal Scheduling of Optical Circuit Switches for LLM Training
Abstract: Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) offers high bandwidth density and energy efficiency for LLM training, but incurs a non-negligible reconfiguration delay. Prior work typically schedules optical circuit switches independently of compute, using aggregate traffic demand to determine which circuits to provision and when. We argue that this separation creates a fundamental inefficiency: reconfigurations that ignore the compute timeline can stall communication, resulting in low circuit utilization and large buffer requirements. In this paper, we present Flux, a scheduler that optimally schedules optical circuit switches based on the structure of the entire workload. Flux remains effective across a wide range of switching speeds by reusing circuits and amortizing reconfiguration delay behind compute and communication. We show that Flux reduces training iteration time by up to $10\times$ and peak NIC buffer requirements by more than three orders of magnitude compared to traditional periodic schedulers.
Adaptive parallel time integration improves computing resource use
Adaptive Parallel-in-Time Integration with Dynamic Resource Management
Abstract: As computational resources continue to grow, the strong-scaling limitations of spatial parallelism motivate the pursuit of additional concurrency in the temporal dimension, particularly for applications with hard time constraints, such as weather and climate simulations. The Parallel Full Approximation Scheme in Space and Time (PFASST) is a parallel-in-time method based on Spectral Deferred Corrections (SDC). It computes multiple timesteps concurrently by coupling fine- and coarse-grid SDC sweeps using multigrid Full Approximation Scheme (FAS) corrections. However, PFASST's convergence is often problem-dependent, demanding a variable number of parallel timesteps and, hence, computing resources at different times throughout the simulation. Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) provides a remedy for this challenge by enabling the adaptive adjustment of computational resources and algorithmic parameters at runtime. In this work, we present our novel approach to extending PFASST with DRM, which enables (a) dynamic adaptation of computing resources, (b) adaptive selection of the number of PFASST iterations based on local convergence behavior, and (c) coupling of these two adaptations into a single resizing strategy. With this approach, we demonstrate for the first time that optimal configurations can be identified in real time for each application, rather than relying on static allocation. Furthermore, we show that convergence-informed tuning of PFASST improves resource utilization and convergence efficiency.
GPU compression cuts climate model communication time greatly
Toward GPU-Resident Climate Models: A Feasibility Study on Lossy Compression for the Spherical Harmonic Transform's Communication Bottleneck
Abstract: Operational pseudospectral atmospheric models such as the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) run today almost exclusively on CPUs; GPU ports are under active development but not yet used in production. These models rely on the Spherical Harmonic Transform (SHT). Each time-step requires forward and inverse SHTs, and both passes depend on global pencil transposition that redistribute multi-dimensional arrays across compute nodes. At large node counts these global collectives dominate wall-clock time. We investigate GPU-resident lossy compression, using representative fields from the DYAMOND high-resolution operational dataset as input, and combining measured GPU compression throughput with SimGrid network simulation, we show that ZFP at 16 bits per value (rate-16), about the same storage budget as float16, matches the communication-time reduction of float16 truncation while delivering approximately $\mathbf{1600\times}$ lower mean relative error. ZFP at 8 bits per value (rate-8) achieves approximately $\mathbf{1.93\times}$ the speedup of float16 while retaining $\mathbf{4\times}$ lower mean relative error.
PixelFlow improves distributed image generation by managing GPU workloads
PixelFlow: Token-Level Workload Management for Efficient Distributed DiT Serving
Abstract: Online image generation with Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) must meet latency service-level objectives (SLOs) while using GPU resources efficiently. Existing systems improve GPU utilization by batching multiple requests for joint execution. However, request-level batching offers limited control over batch size: batches may be too small to saturate GPU compute, while larger ones may violate latency SLOs. Globally coordinated scheduling introduces further delays by requiring independently progressing GPUs to synchronize before admitting new work. We present PixelFlow, a distributed DiT serving system that addresses these limitations through token-level workload management. Its key idea is to use image tokens (the units a DiT processes to generate an image) to divide and batch request workloads at a finer granularity. This allows each GPU to take on a portion of additional work under latency constraints. By distributing these portions across GPUs, PixelFlow accommodates more concurrent requests, improving GPU utilization while reducing queueing delays. To realize this flexibility, PixelFlow provides a runtime that splits requests into variable-sized partitions and batches them efficiently on each GPU. To reduce the resulting communication overhead, it optimizes token placement to limit cross-GPU data exchange while balancing GPU workloads. It further exploits similarity across denoising steps to overlap the remaining transfers with computation. An SLO-aware scheduler groups GPUs to share compute resources among requests with compatible latency requirements. Each group progresses independently, synchronizing with others only when their combined resources are needed to admit a new request. Evaluation with Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.1-dev on H100 GPUs shows that PixelFlow improves SLO attainment by up to 43% and achieves up to 2.8 times the goodput of state-of-the-art DiT serving systems.
MKernel speeds multi-GPU and multi-node training with fused kernels
mKernel: Fast Multi-GPU, Multi-Node Fused Kernels
Abstract: Communication has become a bottleneck in distributed training and inference of large models. Overlapping communication with computation at the granularity of kernels, on separate streams, reduces only part of this communication cost. Fused kernels often have better performance by transmitting each output tile as soon as it is produced, but existing fused kernels are largely confined to a single NVLink domain. We present mKernel, a library of multi-GPU, multi-node fused kernels that overlap computation, intra-node NVLink communication, and inter-node RDMA at tile granularity. mKernel partitions the streaming multiprocessors (SMs) of a persistent kernel into compute and communication roles, and an on-GPU controller tunes the SM partition adaptively at run time, since the best SM partition varies with the kernel and the input shape. It structures data movement hierarchically so that data traversing the inter-node network is minimized. Finally, it drives the network from the GPU through a lightweight command queue and host proxy implemented directly on RDMA verbs, which allows the same kernels to run on any network backend (e.g. InfiniBand and on AWS EFA); we observe, surprisingly, that GPUDirect Async (IBGDA) yields little additional benefit over host-assisted GPU-initiated communication. We implement five kernels spanning tensor, sequence, and expert parallelism. On two 16-GPU H200 clusters, mKernel achieves speedups of up to 1.72x on GEMM+AllReduce and $1.88\times$ on Ring Attention.
SeqMoE improves memory offloading for faster AI model use
SeqMoE: Toward Full-Load Performance via Predictive and Graph-Compatible MoE Offloading
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) creates a structural advantage for offloading: only a small fraction of activated experts need to reside in device memory, and if they can be loaded in time for computation, offloading can in principle approach full-load performance, where all model weights reside in device memory. Yet translating MoE's structural advantage into practical offloading gains remains challenging. We propose SeqMoE to bridge this gap. To maximize expert hits, we build predictive memory management: (i) Sequence-to-sequence prediction. We are the first to recast expert activation prediction as sequence modeling, enabling accurate multi-step, multi-layer forecasts that provide a long and reliable window for downstream decisions. (ii) Joint prefetch scheduling. We formulate prefetch scheduling as Job Sequencing with Deadlines to maximize expected expert hits and improve bandwidth efficiency. (iii) Forecast-driven caching. Leveraging the recursive nature of sequence modeling, we introduce a probabilistic Belady policy for future-aware eviction. To eliminate execution bottleneck, we develop (iv) Graph-compatible offloading runtime. We derive general runtime principles encompassing compute-transparent expert placement and synchronization-free orchestration disciplines for end-to-end graph capture. With 45% expert residency, SeqMoE averages a 96.97% hit rate and 80.22% of full-load performance, advancing the state of the art in MoE offloading.
TinyTC and PyTorch/Triton boost stencil computing on GPUs
Stencil Computation at the Intersection of AI and HPC
Abstract: Tensor compilers such as TinyTC and OpenAI Triton were originally developed for AI workloads, but the same tiling and memory abstractions can be applied to implement efficient high-order stencils for scientific and industrial applications. We demonstrate this for an 8th-order, 25-point acoustic stencil with boundary conditions over an a demanding-sized grid, targeting GPGPUs, where we compare the hardware-specialized TinyTC implementation with a portable PyTorch/Triton implementation. The target platforms for evaluation include Intel B70, B580, GPU MAX 1550, NVIDIA A100/RTX6000 Blackwell/H100, and AMD MI325x. For instance, on Battlemage B580 TinyTC reaches 15.6 Gpts/s versus 13.5 Gpts/s for PT/Triton under random initialization, while zero-initialized runs reach up to 35.8 Gpts/s due to hardware memory compression. Using roofline and memory-hierarchy profiling, we show that -as expected- performance is predominantly bandwidth-limited and that compiler-managed L1/LSC caching can effectively replace programmer-managed shared-memory staging for this stencil class. Overall, the results position TinyTC as the performance-oriented path on Intel hardware and PyTorch/Triton as a strong portability/productivity baseline for cross-vendor HPC stencil development.
Scheduling quantum tasks on multiple devices to reduce errors
Fidelity-Aware Scheduling of Quantum Circuits on Multi-QPU Systems
Abstract: High Performance Computing-Quantum Computing (HPCQC) platforms expose multiple Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) that may differ in size, topology, native gates, and noise characteristics. For current noisy devices, errors compound along the compiled circuits quickly, and minimizing them, that is, maximizing the circuits' execution fidelity, is essential for reliable results. Fidelity depends on the compilation to a specific target device: the same high-level circuit may produce different executables and, therefore, different expected fidelities across QPUs. We present a low-overhead fidelity-aware scheduling framework for multi-QPU systems based on a Graph Neural Network (GNN) that estimates, before compilation, the expected fidelity of each circuit on each available QPU. Then, a tunable scheduler uses these estimates to control the trade-off between execution fidelity and parallelism. Results show that this framework allows for approximating an exhaustive fidelity-based assignment, saving computational resources compared to a brute-force approach that compiles each circuit on every device.
Fp64 emulation gains speed on Nvidia Rubin GPUs with fp8 tensor cores
Ozaki 2.5: Engineering the Deconstruction Path of fp64-Emulated Dense Matrix Multiplication on FP8 Tensor Cores
Abstract: FP8 Ozaki II emulates FP64 matrix multiplication by tensor-core products over a CRT residue system; converting the operands into residue planes (the deconstruction term in the Tensor-Memory Equilibrium model of the companion paper "FP8 is All You Need, Part 1") costs integer-pipe and memory resources before tensor instructions issue. This paper engineers that path; every result is a model projection pending measurement. First, a deconstruction-aware model: on the NVIDIA Rubin GPU the emulated rate reaches the arithmetic roof $P_{\rm FP8}/(3r+1)$ ($\approx 473$ TFLOPS at $r=12$) only within one thread-block cluster; larger outputs are re-split on the fly and held at a floor of $\approx 235$ TFLOPS (half the roof, a ratio of three design integers, not a fit), while real solvers' tall/skinny shapes stay near the crossover, $1.6$-$1.9\times$ over simple deconstruction today. Second, the method: convert-once residue workspaces, an exact two-limb constant-reduction GEMM on integer tensor pipes (or pure-SIMT dp4a), and conversion pipelined behind the MMAs, moving the crossover from $\approx 1211$ to $\approx 480$-$730$. Third, modulus co-design: all-byte and hybrid sets, two supply bounds and a carry-corrected E4M3 split of tail moduli. Fourth and central, the closed-form floor names its hardware escape, and the prize is Rubin's: a stream-side residue-conversion mode on the asynchronous copy path (Option C), a narrow fixed-function block sized as a bill of materials, takes plane formation off the arithmetic pipes and lifts the floor from 235 TFLOPS to the full 473-TFLOPS roof at unchanged cluster reach, about doubling HPL-class FP64 per Rubin GPU, and unbinds conversion-bound sparse kernels. The NVIDIA GB300 GPU, whose 135-TFLOPS roof sits at its own floor, gains little; floor and remedy are Rubin-scale. Application traces ground the analysis; constants are script-checked.
Genesis platform speeds plant research across labs and supercomputers
Exploring the Genesis Platform Capabilities to Accelerate Scientific Discovery in OPAL
Abstract: Autonomous, cross-facility science requires capabilities that no individual project should have to build for itself: managed execution for long-lived services, versioned distribution of models to remote compute systems, governed access to large language models, a shared substrate for experimental data, and end-to-end provenance. The U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission platform, delivered through the American Science Cloud, provides these as reusable services. This paper reports how the Genesis platform enables cross-facility experiments and accelerates scientific discovery. We explore the plant phenotyping workflow of the Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories as the exemplar: it couples Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory with the Frontier supercomputer. In a 40-day nickel-treatment campaign, the resulting workflow replaced roughly twelve hours of manual analysis with interactive queries returning in seconds to minutes.
Kan training scales efficiently on multi gpu high performance computers
Scalability Analysis of Distributed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Training on High-Performance Computing Systems
Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) replace the fixed activation functions and linear weights of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with learnable univariate functions on network edges, offering improved interpretability and, in some settings, competitive parameter efficiency. While the approximation properties of KANs have received considerable attention, their behavior under distributed, multi-GPU training has not been systematically characterized. This paper presents an empirical scalability study of data-parallel KAN training on multi-node, multi-GPU high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, evaluated along four dimensions: strong scaling, weak scaling, communication overhead, and model-size scaling. Experiments were conducted on the FinisTerrae III supercomputer using up to 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs across 4 nodes with PyTorch Distributed Data Parallel (DDP). KAN training reaches 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 GPUs with a 5.97x speedup, consistent with conventional deep learning workloads. Weak scaling shows an initial single-to-multi-GPU throughput drop followed by strong stability. Communication overhead follows a non-monotonic pattern (1.3%-6.1%), driven primarily by All-Reduce algorithm selection and inter-node latency rather than KAN's edge-wise gradient structure. The parameter-to-memory ratio improves with model size even as training time scales unfavorably. These results indicate that operator-level and data-parallel optimizations for KAN are complementary. We provide deployment guidelines for GPU topology and model-size selection, and discuss the limitations of a synthetic-regression evaluation.