PipeWeave: Synergizing Analytical and Learning Models for Unified GPU Performance Prediction

TL;DR

PipeWeave is a unified GPU performance prediction framework combining analytical and machine learning models, achieving high accuracy and generalizability across diverse hardware and kernels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid modeling approach that leverages analytical features with ML to improve GPU performance prediction accuracy and applicability.

Findings

Achieves 6.1% average kernel-level prediction error.

Reduces error of state-of-the-art methods by 6.7x.

Enables optimization of production kernels with up to 1.7x speedup.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of Transformer-based large language models has dramatically increased the need for high-performance GPUs. As a result, there is growing demand for fast, accurate, and widely generalizable GPU performance models to support next-generation hardware selection and system-level exploration. However, current data-driven methods are limited, exhibiting poor generalization across hardware and inadequate modeling of complex production-level kernels common in modern inference stacks. To address these issues, we present PipeWeave, a unified GPU modeling framework. This approach first employs an analytical model to quantify a given kernel's demands on the GPU's heterogeneous instruction pipelines. These analytical features are then fed into a machine learning (ML) model to capture complex cross-pipeline interactions and resource dependencies, enabling high-fidelity performance prediction. Our evaluation across 11 GPU types from four generations of major architectures on two widely-used serving systems demonstrates that PipeWeave delivers high fidelity and strong generalizability. It achieves accurate predictions, with only 6.1% average error at the kernel level and 8.5% for end-to-end inference -- reducing the error of state-of-the-art methods by 6.7x and 4.4x, respectively. We also demonstrate PipeWeave's value "beyond simulation" by utilizing its performance ceiling to diagnose implementation shortcomings and guide the optimization of a production fused MoE Triton kernel, achieving up to 1.7x speedup. Code is available https://github.com/zksainx/pipeweave.