RESEARCH

Day 83/365 of GPU Programming Looking at DeepSeek's Multi-Head Latent Attention today. The last part of the AMD challenge series is to optimize an MLA decode kernel for MI355X where the absorbed Q and compressed KV cache are given and your task is to do the attention computation. A resource that really helped internalize what MLA does was @rasbt's incredible visual guide to attention variants in LLMs (luckily he posted that last week!), which covers everything from MHA to GQA to MLA to SWA, et cetera. If there's one place to get a visual intuition for recent attention mechanisms, it's this blog post. @jbhuang0604's video on MQA, GQA,MLA and DSA was the best conceptual intro I found on the topic and progressively builds up the ideas from first principles. The Welch Labs analysis of MLA is a great watch as well. Beautiful visualization of the changes DeepSeek made for MLA. Tried out a few kernels once I had a basic understanding of MLA and I think I'm slowly getting more comfortable with at least analyzing kernels. levi (@levidiamode) Day 82/365 of GPU Programming Taking a closer look at Mixture of Experts today, so I can write better MoE kernels. Specifically, to optimize an MXFP4 MoE fused kernel for the GPU Mode challenge. I haven't had much prior exposure to MoEs, so lots of new concepts I learned today. Luckily I found the best intro to MoEs thanks to @MaartenGr visual overview of the topic. I then watched @tatsu_hashimoto's amazing Stanford CS336 lecture on MoEs, which added deeper context around why MoEs are gaining popularity, FLOPs, OLMoE, infra complexity, routing functions (mindblown this works so well…), expert sizes, training objectives, top k routing and DeepSeek variations. Once I had a basic understanding I started playing around with the some AITER kernels but progress there is tbd. Also had a nice chat with @juscallmevyom (who was kind enough to reach out!) about the AMD kernels and the challenge of materialization overhead. — https://nitter.net/levidiamode/status/2037297869518950430#m

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