{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/gpu-performance-portability-needs-autotuning","title":"GPU Performance Portability needs Autotuning","arxiv_id":"2505.03780","date":"2025-04-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Burkhard Ringlein","Thomas Parnell","Radu Stoica"],"abstract":"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 kernel parameter autotuning to enable portable LLM inference with state-of-the-art performance without code changes. Focusing on flash attention -- a widespread performance critical LLM kernel -- 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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03780v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03780v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"gpu-performance-portability-needs-autotuning","repo_url":"https://github.com/IBM/triton-dejavu","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}