arXiv Machine Learning

Dissecting GPU Utilization for LLM Inference on Nvidia Hopper

The paper investigates how a single SM utilization metric can misrepresent the true workload of large language model (LLM) inference on Nvidia Hopper GPUs. By profiling vLLM with FlashAttention‑3 and cuBLASLt on an H100 NVL across various phases (cold prefill, warm prefill, and decode) and varying sequence length and batch size, the authors replace the single utilization figure with eight detailed counter‑validated views. These views, tied to specific Nsight Compute counters or formulas, reveal how factors such as fragment fill, occupancy limits, stall signatures, wave quantization, and kernel selection create utilization gaps across four production models and six per‑layer kernel roles.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Tile-Level Activation Overlap for Efficient LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 02521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SwiGLU is the dominant MLP activation in modern large language models, yet its intermediate tensor materialization costs 9-37% of MLP execution time.

By Abhinav Jangda, Tyler Sorensen, Sebastian Burckhardt, Jianlan YE, Chaoyin Li, Atul Gupta
arXiv AI
Jun 30

KernelSight-LM: A Kernel-Level LLM Inference Simulator

arXiv:2606. 28565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) move into production serving, practitioners must rapidly evaluate inference performance across diverse hardware, models, and serving parameters to meet cost and latency targets.

By Xiteng Yao, Taeho Kim, Hengzhi Pei, Xinle Liu, Kyle Ulrich, Leonard Lausen, Ashish Khetan, Xiang Song, George Karypis, Martin Herbordt
arXiv AI
Jul 28

X-Stage: An Overlooked Pipeline Stage for Communication-Computation Overlap in DiT Inference

arXiv:2607. 23264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained, device-initiated communication lets persistent GPU kernels in distributed diffusion transformer (DiT) inference issue remote stores and overlap data movement with Tensor Core computation.

By Jianwen Xian, Zhiyuan Xu, Yuchen Li, Ziliang Lai, Kang He, Zhen Huang, Aichen Feng, Jinyan Chen, Yilin Zhang, Qinqin Chen, Chengru Song