{"id":30371,"date":"2025-11-23T19:33:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T17:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/?p=30371"},"modified":"2025-11-23T19:33:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T17:33:24","slug":"the-anatomy-of-a-triton-attention-kernel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/?p=30371","title":{"rendered":"The Anatomy of a Triton Attention Kernel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A long-standing goal in both industry and academia is to develop an LLM inference platform that is portable across hardware architectures, eliminates the need for low-level hand-tuning, and still delivers best-in-class efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate that portable, efficient cross-platform LLM inference is indeed possible and share our experience. We develop a state-of-the-art paged attention kernel, the core performance-critical component of many LLM deployments, that builds exclusively on the domain-specific just-in-time compiled language Triton to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. We describe our high-level approach, the key algorithmic and system-level improvements, the parameter auto-tuning required to unlock efficiency, and the integrations into a popular inference server that are necessary to bring the performance of a generic Triton attention kernel from 19.7% of the state-of-the-art to 105.9%. Our results highlight how open-source domain-specific languages can be leveraged to unlock model portability across different GPU vendors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A long-standing goal in both industry and academia is to develop an LLM inference platform that is portable across hardware architectures, eliminates the need for low-level hand-tuning, and still delivers best-in-class efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate that portable, efficient cross-platform LLM inference is indeed possible and share our experience. We develop a state-of-the-art paged [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":351,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,89,3],"tags":[2135,2159,7,1782,14,1651,2063,2155,20,2132,67,660,2182],"class_list":["post-30371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-nvidia-cuda","category-paper","tag-amd-radeon-instinct-mi250","tag-amd-radeon-instinct-mi300x","tag-ati","tag-computer-science","tag-cuda","tag-dsl","tag-hip","tag-llm","tag-nvidia","tag-nvidia-h100","tag-performance","tag-programming-languages","tag-triton"],"views":1687,"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/351"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}