I kind of noticed it, but who would've thought performance could change just by the name... isn't that surprising?💡
Recently, in Triton - a project for handling GPU code - there's been talk that FP8 (8-bit floating point) processing becomes approximately 100TFLOPS faster just by naming the kernel 'cutlass'✨
This is a somewhat mysterious phenomenon where the code itself doesn't change much, but just the name makes it incredibly fast😳
What is FP8 Anyway?
FP8 is a new floating-point format that represents numbers using 8 bits.
Compared to regular FP32 (32-bit) or FP16 (16-bit), it's said to be more memory-efficient and better suited for high-speed computation🧠✨
But since it's still new, things like how to optimize it and whether we're using it properly are still in the trial-and-error stage💭
What are Triton and 'cutlass'?
Triton is like a programming language for efficient computation on NVIDIA GPUs🎀
And 'cutlass' is the name of a high-speed matrix computation library released by NVIDIA, but apparently just adding this name to Triton kernels made performance skyrocket❣️
In other words, it seems that having 'cutlass' in the name changes the GPU's internal optimization and speeds things up💡
Why Does It Get Faster Just by the Name?
This part isn't fully understood yet, but it appears that the compiler or GPU execution environment has optimization patterns specifically tailored to the 'cutlass' name👀
So even with similar code, having 'cutlass' in the name makes it take a dedicated high-speed processing route✨
It's kind of like a 'secret command' - pretty interesting, right?🥺
Summary
- FP8 is a new lightweight numerical format
- Triton is a programming tool for GPUs
- It was discovered that simply naming a kernel 'cutlass' makes FP8 processing approximately 100TFLOPS faster
- The mechanism of name-based optimization is still a mystery, but it seems the GPU has special handling for it
Seeing performance change so dramatically with these little tricks really makes you feel the fun of technology～😆✨
Maybe there are other hidden optimizations like this 'power of names' out there...?💭
Hatena
Comments
クリス
Apparently the compiler checks if the string contains 'cutlass' and applies special optimizations, which makes processing faster.
キンバリー
Can someone explain this in a way even a child could understand? FP8 is for neural network quantization, right? But here, does kernel mean Linux kernel?
ベン
Wait, what is that?
ロバート
(This comment has been deleted)
ハンナ
This is interesting but I don't really get it, could this be used in games like Megabonk to sacrifice calculation accuracy for speed?
