Ansh Chaurasia

Ansh Chaurasia

Backpropogating on intelligent machines from novel attention mechanisms down to the silicon interposers.

GQA, and it’s associated inference tokenomics

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Takeaways

  • Written proof on the arithmetic intensity of attention leaves it memory bound in the decode stage, along with the critical operation that makes attention memory bound
  • Written proof on why attention can be compute bound, along with the critical operation that makes attention memory bound
  • How GQA can help push decode towards the compute bound

Full version on Substack → Grouped Query Attention and Tokenomics

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Making memory bound kernels go brr on AMD’s MI300X

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Takeaways

  • Analyzed a vector add kernel using roofline analysis on a MI300X
  • Gathered perf counter data that additionally validated roofline assumptions, defined bandwidth util as a good figure of merit
  • Mathematically found ridge point, and demonstrated that the vector add kernel in current form will be memory bound, regardless of N
  • Delved into the actual internals of MI300X’s memory subsystem
  • Messed around with the memory subsystem to show a quetionably tiny amount of speedup

Cartpole: A somewhat deep introduction to RL and value based learning

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  • Trained a RL policy model from scratch, with the weights open sourced and released on huggingface
  • Beyond surface level discussion of the training dynamics, with specific analysis of loss curves and rewards in W&B runs
  • Discussion of training failures, and how using a target network can be used to prevent training instability

Kernels, and a cheeky IEEE-754 proof with somewhat practical debugging value

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Published:

Takeaways

  • Designed a kernel, which faces a bug. Understanding and debugging the issue teaches you a lot about the limitations of floating point representations
  • Delved deeper into the mathematics of IEEE-754, and common implementations of the standard such as bfloat16, fp32, fp64, and fp8
  • Explained why an unsigned 32 bit integer may be more precise in workloads such as hashing than FP32
  • Conclude with a mathematical proof that characterizes the cases in which a 32-bit integer will be more precise than floating point schemes like FP32