arXiv Machine Learning By Mohammad Siavashi, Gerald Q. Maguire Jr., Dejan Kostic, Marco Chiesa

Dissecting GPU Utilization for LLM Inference on Nvidia Hopper

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Accelerating the Mitigation of LLM Inference Nondeterminism Across GPU Architectures

The paper addresses the problem of non‑deterministic outputs from large language models (LLMs) when run on different GPU architectures, caused by floating‑point non‑associativity and hardware‑dependent kernel choices. It proposes a set of fixed‑configuration fused‑upcast GEMM kernels that load 16‑bit weights, upcast to FP32, and perform IEEE‑754 compliant reductions in a problem‑shape‑dependent order, ensuring identical linear‑layer outputs across NVIDIA Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPUs. The new approach achieves 1.17–3.1× faster end‑to‑end performance than existing solutions and halves weight‑memory traffic while maintaining cross‑architecture reproducibility.

By Liam Cooper, Shinnung Jeong, Hyeran Jeon, Jeffrey Young, Hyesoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

One Megakernel is Not Enough: Predicting Where to Cut for Streaming Inference

The paper investigates how to optimally partition streaming inference models into megakernels and conventional graph components. It introduces a framework that predicts the best megakernel composition without full end‑to‑end runs, showing that multiple megakernels or a fully conventional graph often outperform a single megakernel across various models and batch sizes. The study defines four model categories based on megakernel stability and demonstrates significant latency and throughput gains on an H100 NVL GPU using a three‑megakernel design.

By Aditya Chatterjee, Anand Joseph X M, Sanjay Singh Chauhan