Burkhard Ringlein

Burkhard Ringlein, Jan van Lunteren, Radu Stoica et al.

A long-standing goal in both industry and academia is to develop an LLM inference platform that is portable across hardware architectures, eliminates the need for low-level hand-tuning, and still delivers best-in-class efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate that portable, efficient cross-platform LLM inference is indeed possible and share our experience. We develop a state-of-the-art paged attention kernel, the core performance-critical component of many LLM deployments, that builds exclusively on the domain-specific just-in-time compiled language Triton to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. We describe our high-level approach, the key algorithmic and system-level improvements, the parameter auto-tuning required to unlock efficiency, and the integrations into a popular inference server that are necessary to bring the performance of a generic Triton attention kernel from 19.7% of the state-of-the-art to 105.9%. Our results highlight how open-source domain-specific languages can be leveraged to unlock model portability across different GPU vendors.

Burkhard Ringlein, Thomas Parnell, Radu Stoica

As LLMs grow in complexity, achieving state-of-the-art performance requires tight co-design across algorithms, software, and hardware. Today's reliance on a single dominant platform limits portability, creates vendor lock-in, and raises barriers for new AI hardware. In this work, we make the case for combining just-in-time (JIT) compilation with comprehensive kernel parameter autotuning to enable portable LLM inference with state-of-the-art performance without code changes. Focusing on performance-critical LLM kernels, we demonstrate that this approach explores up to 15x more kernel parameter configurations, produces significantly more diverse code across multiple dimensions, and even outperforms vendor-optimized implementations by up to 230%, all while reducing kernel code size by 70x and eliminating manual code optimizations. Our results highlight autotuning as a promising path to unlocking model portability across GPU vendors.

Dionysios Diamantopoulos, Burkhard Ringlein, Mitra Purandare et al.

Specialized accelerators for tensor-operations, such as blocked-matrix operations and multi-dimensional convolutions, have been emerged as powerful architecture choices for high-performance Deep-Learning computing. The rapid development of frameworks, models, and precision options challenges the adaptability of such tensor-accelerators since the adaptation to new requirements incurs significant engineering costs. Programmable tensor accelerators offer a promising alternative by allowing reconfiguration of a virtual architecture that overlays on top of the physical FPGA configurable fabric. We propose an overlay (τ-VTA) and an optimization method guided by agile-inspired auto-tuning techniques. We achieve higher performance and faster convergence than state-of-art.