Mojo: MLIR-Based Performance-Portable HPC Science Kernels on GPUs for the Python Ecosystem
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
arXiv:2509.21039 [cs.DC], (25 Sep 2025)
@misc{godoy2025mojo,
title={Mojo: MLIR-Based Performance-Portable HPC Science Kernels on GPUs for the Python Ecosystem},
author={William F. Godoy and Tatiana Melnichenko and Pedro Valero-Lara and Wael Elwasif and Philip Fackler and Rafael Ferreira Da Silva and Keita Teranishi and Jeffrey S. Vetter},
year={2025},
eprint={2509.21039},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.DC}
}
We explore the performance and portability of the novel Mojo language for scientific computing workloads on GPUs. As the first language based on the LLVM’s Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) compiler infrastructure, Mojo aims to close performance and productivity gaps by combining Python’s interoperability and CUDA-like syntax for compile-time portable GPU programming. We target four scientific workloads: a seven-point stencil (memory-bound), BabelStream (memory-bound), miniBUDE (compute-bound), and Hartree-Fock (compute-bound with atomic operations); and compare their performance against vendor baselines on NVIDIA H100 and AMD MI300A GPUs. We show that Mojo’s performance is competitive with CUDA and HIP for memory-bound kernels, whereas gaps exist on AMD GPUs for atomic operations and for fast-math compute-bound kernels on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Although the learning curve and programming requirements are still fairly low-level, Mojo can close significant gaps in the fragmented Python ecosystem in the convergence of scientific computing and AI.
September 28, 2025 by hgpu
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