7.6ARMar 23
SCALE-Sim TPU: Validating and Extending SCALE-Sim for TPUsJingtian Dang, Ritik Raj, Changhai Man et al.
Cycle-accurate simulators are widely used to study systolic accelerators, yet their accuracy and usability are often limited by weak validation against real hardware and poor integration with modern ML compiler stacks. This paper presents SCALE-Sim TPU, a validated and extended version of SCALE-Sim v3 for TPU-style accelerators. Specifically, we make three contributions: (1) We validate SCALE-Sim's systolic GEMM model against measurements on Google TPU v4 and show that simulated cycle counts exhibit a strong linear correlation with hardware latency, enabling a simple cycle-to-latency mapping. (2) We introduce lightweight learned latency models for non-systolic elementwise operations, achieving median relative errors below 3 percent using only tensor size and shape, substantially improving end-to-end latency estimation. (3) We integrate a StableHLO-based frontend that allows workloads from modern ML frameworks such as JAX and PyTorch to be simulated directly via a unified compiler IR. Together, these contributions improve the fidelity, coverage, and practicality of cycle-accurate simulation for whole-model performance analysis on TPUs.
2.4AIJan 28
REASON: Accelerating Probabilistic Logical Reasoning for Scalable Neuro-Symbolic IntelligenceZishen Wan, Che-Kai Liu, Jiayi Qian et al.
Neuro-symbolic AI systems integrate neural perception with symbolic reasoning to enable data-efficient, interpretable, and robust intelligence beyond purely neural models. Although this compositional paradigm has shown superior performance in domains such as reasoning, planning, and verification, its deployment remains challenging due to severe inefficiencies in symbolic and probabilistic inference. Through systematic analysis of representative neuro-symbolic workloads, we identify probabilistic logical reasoning as the inefficiency bottleneck, characterized by irregular control flow, low arithmetic intensity, uncoalesced memory accesses, and poor hardware utilization on CPUs and GPUs. This paper presents REASON, an integrated acceleration framework for probabilistic logical reasoning in neuro-symbolic AI. REASON introduces a unified directed acyclic graph representation that captures common structure across symbolic and probabilistic models, coupled with adaptive pruning and regularization. At the architecture level, REASON features a reconfigurable, tree-based processing fabric optimized for irregular traversal, symbolic deduction, and probabilistic aggregation. At the system level, REASON is tightly integrated with GPU streaming multiprocessors through a programmable interface and multi-level pipeline that efficiently orchestrates compositional execution. Evaluated across six neuro-symbolic workloads, REASON achieves 12-50x speedup and 310-681x energy efficiency over desktop and edge GPUs under TSMC 28 nm node. REASON enables real-time probabilistic logical reasoning, completing end-to-end tasks in 0.8 s with 6 mm2 area and 2.12 W power, demonstrating that targeted acceleration of probabilistic logical reasoning is critical for practical and scalable neuro-symbolic AI and positioning REASON as a foundational system architecture for next-generation cognitive intelligence.
Evaluating Cross-Architecture Performance Modeling of Distributed ML Workloads Using StableHLOJonas Svedas, Nathan Laubeuf, Ryan Harvey et al.
Predicting the performance of large-scale distributed machine learning (ML) workloads across multiple accelerator architectures remains a central challenge in ML system design. Existing GPU and TPU focused simulators are typically architecture-specific, while distributed training simulators rely on workload-specific analytical models or costly post-execution traces, limiting portability and cross-platform comparison. This work evaluates whether MLIR's StableHLO dialect can serve as a unified workload representation for cross-architecture and cross-fidelity performance modeling of distributed ML workloads. The study establishes a StableHLO-based simulation methodology that maps a single workload representation onto multiple performance models, spanning analytical, profiling-based, and simulator-driven predictors. Using this methodology, workloads are evaluated across GPUs and TPUs without requiring access to scaled-out physical systems, enabling systematic comparison across modeling fidelities. An empirical evaluation covering distributed GEMM kernels, ResNet, and large language model training workloads demonstrates that StableHLO preserves relative performance trends across architectures and fidelities, while exposing accuracy trade-offs and simulator limitations. Across evaluated scenarios, prediction errors remain within practical bounds for early-stage design exploration, and the methodology reveals fidelity-dependent limitations in existing GPU simulators. These results indicate that StableHLO provides a viable foundation for unified, distributed ML performance modeling across accelerator architectures and simulators, supporting reusable evaluation workflows and cross-validation throughout the ML system design process.