Tianqi Chen
Publications
SOL-ExecBench: Speed-of-Light Benchmarking for Real-World GPU Kernels Against Hardware Limits
As agentic AI systems become increasingly capable of generating and optimizing GPU kernels, progress is constrained by benchmarks that reward speedup over software baselines rather than proximity to hardware-efficient execution. We present SOL-ExecBench, a benchmark of 235 CUDA kernel optimization problems extracted from 124 production and emerging AI models spanning language, diffusion, vision, audio, video, and hybrid architectures, targeting NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. The benchmark covers forward and backward workloads across BF16, FP8, and NVFP4, including kernels whose best performance is expected to rely on Blackwell-specific capabilities. Unlike prior benchmarks that evaluate kernels primarily relative to software implementations, SOL-ExecBench measures performance against analytically derived Speed-of-Light (SOL) bounds computed by SOLAR, our pipeline for deriving hardware-grounded SOL bounds, yielding a fixed target for hardware-efficient optimization. We report a SOL Score that quantifies how much of the gap between a release-defined scoring baseline and the hardware SOL bound a candidate kernel closes. To support robust evaluation of agentic optimizers, we additionally provide a sandboxed harness with GPU clock locking, L2 cache clearing, isolated subprocess execution, and static analysis based checks against common reward-hacking strategies. SOL-ExecBench reframes GPU kernel benchmarking from beating a mutable software baseline to closing the remaining gap to hardware Speed-of-Light.
FlashInfer-Bench: Building the Virtuous Cycle for AI-driven LLM Systems
Recent advances show that large language models (LLMs) can act as autonomous agents capable of generating GPU kernels, but integrating these AI-generated kernels into real-world inference systems remains challenging. FlashInfer-Bench addresses this gap by establishing a standardized, closed-loop framework that connects kernel generation, benchmarking, and deployment. At its core, FlashInfer Trace provides a unified schema describing kernel definitions, workloads, implementations, and evaluations, enabling consistent communication between agents and systems. Built on real serving traces, FlashInfer-Bench includes a curated dataset, a robust correctness- and performance-aware benchmarking framework, a public leaderboard to track LLM agents' GPU programming capabilities, and a dynamic substitution mechanism (apply()) that seamlessly injects the best-performing kernels into production LLM engines such as SGLang and vLLM. Using FlashInfer-Bench, we further evaluate the performance and limitations of LLM agents, compare the trade-offs among different GPU programming languages, and provide insights for future agent design. FlashInfer-Bench thus establishes a practical, reproducible pathway for continuously improving AI-generated kernels and deploying them into large-scale LLM inference.