As model architectures converge—for example, on multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers—the pursuit of peak performance is leading to the emergence of "Megakernels." A Megakernel is effectively the entire forward pass (or a large portion) of one specific model, hand-coded using a lower-level API like the CUDA SDK on NVIDIA GPUs. This approach achieves maximum hardware utilization by aggressively overlapping compute, memory, and communication. Recent work from the research community has demonstrated that this approach can yield significant throughput gains, over 22% in some cases, for inference on GPUs. This trend is not limited to inference; evidence suggests that some large-scale training efforts have involved low-level hardware control to achieve substantial efficiency gains.
0 commit comments