DCDec 7, 2022
SAIH: A Scalable Evaluation Methodology for Understanding AI Performance Trend on HPC SystemsJiangsu Du, Dongsheng Li, Yingpeng Wen et al.
Novel artificial intelligence (AI) technology has expedited various scientific research, e.g., cosmology, physics and bioinformatics, inevitably becoming a significant category of workload on high performance computing (HPC) systems. Existing AI benchmarks tend to customize well-recognized AI applications, so as to evaluate the AI performance of HPC systems under predefined problem size, in terms of datasets and AI models. Due to lack of scalability on the problem size, static AI benchmarks might be under competent to help understand the performance trend of evolving AI applications on HPC systems, in particular, the scientific AI applications on large-scale systems. In this paper, we propose a scalable evaluation methodology (SAIH) for analyzing the AI performance trend of HPC systems with scaling the problem sizes of customized AI applications. To enable scalability, SAIH builds a set of novel mechanisms for augmenting problem sizes. As the data and model constantly scale, we can investigate the trend and range of AI performance on HPC systems, and further diagnose system bottlenecks. To verify our methodology, we augment a cosmological AI application to evaluate a real HPC system equipped with GPUs as a case study of SAIH.
DCNov 18, 2025Code
PolyKAN: Efficient Fused GPU Operators for Polynomial Kolmogorov-Arnold Network VariantsMingkun Yu, Heming Zhong, Dan Huang et al.
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) promise higher expressive capability and stronger interpretability than Multi-Layer Perceptron, particularly in the domain of AI for Science. However, practical adoption has been hindered by low GPU utilization of existing parallel implementations. To address this challenge, we present a GPU-accelerated operator library, named PolyKAN which is the first general open-source implementation of KAN and its variants. PolyKAN fuses the forward and backward passes of polynomial KAN layers into a concise set of optimized CUDA kernels. Four orthogonal techniques underpin the design: (i) \emph{lookup-table} with linear interpolation that replaces runtime expensive math-library functions; (ii) \emph{2D tiling} to expose thread-level parallelism with preserving memory locality; (iii) a \emph{two-stage reduction} scheme converting scattered atomic updates into a single controllable merge step; and (iv) \emph{coefficient-layout reordering} yielding unit-stride reads under the tiled schedule. Using a KAN variant, Chebyshev KAN, as a case-study, PolyKAN delivers $1.2$--$10\times$ faster inference and $1.4$--$12\times$ faster training than a Triton + cuBLAS baseline, with identical accuracy on speech, audio-enhancement, and tabular-regression workloads on both highend GPU and consumer-grade GPU.
DCMay 4
PipeMax: Enhancing Offline LLM Inference on Commodity GPU ServersHongbin Zhang, Taosheng Wei, Jiazhi Jiang et al.
Offline LLM inference seeks to maximize request processing under fixed budgets, making commodity GPU servers a promising choice. However, prior work typically considers offloading and parallelism in isolation, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose PipeMax, a high-throughput LLM inference system that integrates pipeline parallelism with offloading to overcome interconnect and memory constraints on GPU servers. Particularly, pipeline parallelism naturally incurs low communication overhead and keeps only one batch active on each GPU at a time, which enables offloading the KV cache of inactive batches. By coordinating computation with offloading data movement, PipeMax effectively expands GPU memory capacity and sustains large-batch execution. Experiments show that PipeMax achieves up to 2.51x higher throughput than vLLM, and up to 1.42x and 1.38x higher throughput than state-of-the-art high-throughput LLM systems, respectively, on an 8-GPU node.
CLAug 16, 2025
STEM: Efficient Relative Capability Evaluation of LLMs through Structured Transition SamplesHaiquan Hu, Jiazhi Jiang, Shiyou Xu et al.
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly challenging as model capabilities advance rapidly. While recent models often achieve higher scores on standard benchmarks, these improvements do not consistently reflect enhanced real-world reasoning capabilities. Moreover, widespread overfitting to public benchmarks and the high computational cost of full evaluations have made it both expensive and less effective to distinguish meaningful differences between models. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{S}tructured \textbf{T}ransition \textbf{E}valuation \textbf{M}ethod (STEM), a lightweight and interpretable evaluation framework for efficiently estimating the relative capabilities of LLMs. STEM identifies \textit{significant transition samples} (STS) by analyzing consistent performance transitions among LLMs of the same architecture but varying parameter scales. These samples enable STEM to effectively estimate the capability position of an unknown model. Qwen3 model family is applied to construct the STS pool on six diverse and representative benchmarks. To assess generalizability. Experimental results indicate that STEM reliably captures performance trends, aligns with ground-truth rankings of model capability. These findings highlight STEM as a practical and scalable method for fine-grained, architecture-agnostic evaluation of LLMs.