LightCode: Compiling LLM Inference for Photonic-Electronic Systems
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908549100077056 |
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| author | Tomich, Ryan Zhong, Zhizhen Englund, Dirk |
| author_facet | Tomich, Ryan Zhong, Zhizhen Englund, Dirk |
| contents | The growing demand for low-latency, energy-efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed interest in heterogeneous architectures. While GPUs remain dominant, they are poorly suited for integration with emerging domain-specific accelerators like the Photonic Tensor Units (PTUs), which offer low-power, high-throughput linear computation. This motivates hybrid compilation strategies that combine photonic and electronic resources. We present LightCode, a compiler framework and simulator for mapping LLM inference workloads across hybrid photonic-electronic systems. LightCode introduces the Stacked Graph, an intermediate representation that encodes multiple hardware-specific realizations of each tensor operation. Hardware assignment is formulated as a constrained subgraph selection problem optimized for latency or energy under parametric cost models. We evaluate LightCode on the prefill stage of GPT-2 and Llama-7B showing that under our workload and hardware assumptions, (i) Photonic hardware reduced energy by up to 50% in our simulated workloads at maximum sequence length; (ii) multiplexing and assignment strategy yielded latency improvements exceeding 10x; and (iii) Optimizing for latency or energy resulted in distinct hardware mappings in our simulations. LightCode offers a module, foundational framework and simulator for compiling LLMs to emerging photonic accelerators. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16443 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | LightCode: Compiling LLM Inference for Photonic-Electronic Systems Tomich, Ryan Zhong, Zhizhen Englund, Dirk Applied Physics Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages The growing demand for low-latency, energy-efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed interest in heterogeneous architectures. While GPUs remain dominant, they are poorly suited for integration with emerging domain-specific accelerators like the Photonic Tensor Units (PTUs), which offer low-power, high-throughput linear computation. This motivates hybrid compilation strategies that combine photonic and electronic resources. We present LightCode, a compiler framework and simulator for mapping LLM inference workloads across hybrid photonic-electronic systems. LightCode introduces the Stacked Graph, an intermediate representation that encodes multiple hardware-specific realizations of each tensor operation. Hardware assignment is formulated as a constrained subgraph selection problem optimized for latency or energy under parametric cost models. We evaluate LightCode on the prefill stage of GPT-2 and Llama-7B showing that under our workload and hardware assumptions, (i) Photonic hardware reduced energy by up to 50% in our simulated workloads at maximum sequence length; (ii) multiplexing and assignment strategy yielded latency improvements exceeding 10x; and (iii) Optimizing for latency or energy resulted in distinct hardware mappings in our simulations. LightCode offers a module, foundational framework and simulator for compiling LLMs to emerging photonic accelerators. |
| title | LightCode: Compiling LLM Inference for Photonic-Electronic Systems |
| topic | Applied Physics Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16443 |