Towards Data Science

GPU-Resident Top-K for Agentic RAG: I Built a CUDA Kernel So My Retrieval Step Would Stop Bouncing Off the GPU

The PCIe transfer latency is silently bottlenecking your agentic inference. Here is how building a custom device-resident vector search kernel bypasses the CPU to unlock deterministic microsecond tail latencies.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

DataKernelBench: Can LLMs Optimize Database Queries on GPUs?

DataKernelBench evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) can optimize database queries for GPU execution. The benchmark translates SQL into PyTorch TorchPlan programs and tests LLMs on optimizing core tensor snippets or full queries in CUDA or Triton, using execution-guided repair. On TPC‑H SF10 with an H100 GPU, the best full‑query CUDA configuration outperforms torch.compile by 2.11×, and extending TorchPlan with Dask‑cuDF enables a 2.54× speedup on TPC‑H SF100 across four H100 GPUs.

By Gokul Karthik Kumar, Yotam Perlitz, Corey Lammie, Andrea Giovannini, Katja Hose
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

AMDKernelVault: Large-Scale Datasets and Agentic Training for AMD GPU Kernel Optimization

AMDKernelVault is an open HIP and Triton kernel corpus and training framework designed for AMD CDNA GPUs. It includes 62,153 verified HIP kernels, 39,893 Triton kernels, and 2,377 ROCm library QA entries, and introduces agent-driven pipelines (HIPKernelGen and TritonKernelGen) that convert PyTorch references into GPU kernels, compile, validate, and profile them on AMD hardware. The corpus was used to fine‑tune Qwen3-8B, achieving the highest correctness on several benchmarks such as PyTorch-to-HIP, TritonBench‑G, and ROCmBench under fixed evaluation budgets.

By Ji Liu, Saptarshi Majumder, Yiqing Huang, Wenwen Ouyang, Umang Pandey, Zeping Li, Chushi Chen, Zihao An, Puyuan Yang, Zekai Li, Sina Rafati, Ziqiong Liu, Pratik Prabhanjan Brahma, Dong Li, Zicheng Liu, Sharon Zhou, Emad Barsoum
arXiv AI
Aug 19

KernelArc: A Multi-Agent Framework for GPU Kernel Optimization

KernelArc is a multi-agent framework designed to autonomously optimize GPU kernels across diverse workloads. It employs strategy-specialized agents that run concurrently, coordinating via conclusions-only shared memory, a deterministic benchmark guard, and read-only cross-agent state with plateau-triggered drafting. Evaluated on NVIDIA H100 and B200 GPUs with SOL-ExecBench workloads, KernelArc produced top-ranked implementations for tasks such as BF16 GEMM, cuBLASLt configuration tables, and various attention mechanisms, achieving first place on several leaderboard categories.

By Joyjit Kundu, Ben Stoffelen, Kaili Wang, Peter Vrancx, Ludovic Denoyer