FastKernels: Benchmarking GPU Kernel Generation in Production
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914590806245376 |
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| author | Oliaro, Gabriele Fu, Yichao Jiang, May Lu, Owen Wang, Junli Jia, Zhihao Zhang, Hao Rajbhandari, Samyam |
| author_facet | Oliaro, Gabriele Fu, Yichao Jiang, May Lu, Owen Wang, Junli Jia, Zhihao Zhang, Hao Rajbhandari, Samyam |
| contents | LLM-based agents for GPU kernel generation are advancing rapidly, yet their progress is fundamentally constrained by the benchmarks they optimize against. Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with production inference frameworks: they evaluate kernels on a single GPU with synthetic inputs, ignore the surrounding compilation stack, and reward replicating known optimizations rather than discovering new ones. The resulting reward signals are misleading: agents learn to generate kernels that score well in sandboxes but introduce interface incompatibilities, compilation-stack conflicts, and silent correctness degradation when integrated into real systems. We introduce FastKernels, a kernel benchmark built around a minimal set of 46 representative architectures spanning 8 categories, whose kernels collectively subsume those of 96.2% (409/425) of HuggingFace Transformers architectures. FastKernels doubles as a minimalistic, production-grade inference framework that runs at parity with hardened systems such as vLLM and SGLang on mainstream LLM serving and substantially exceeds upstream references on under-served architectures; each task's interface mirrors the corresponding module in the state-of-the-art library for its architecture family, enabling direct deployment of optimized kernels into production codebases. Evaluating state-of-the-art kernel agents on FastKernels, we find that even the strongest agent achieves only 0.94$\times$ aggregate speedup over production baselines, with weaker agents at $0.78\times$ and $0.53\times$ -- confirming that benchmark-production misalignment is a critical bottleneck for the field. We release FastKernels as a stepping stone toward kernel agents whose benchmark gains translate directly into production throughput improvements. Code is available at https://github.com/Snowflake-AI-Research/fastkernels |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_23215 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | FastKernels: Benchmarking GPU Kernel Generation in Production Oliaro, Gabriele Fu, Yichao Jiang, May Lu, Owen Wang, Junli Jia, Zhihao Zhang, Hao Rajbhandari, Samyam Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language LLM-based agents for GPU kernel generation are advancing rapidly, yet their progress is fundamentally constrained by the benchmarks they optimize against. Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with production inference frameworks: they evaluate kernels on a single GPU with synthetic inputs, ignore the surrounding compilation stack, and reward replicating known optimizations rather than discovering new ones. The resulting reward signals are misleading: agents learn to generate kernels that score well in sandboxes but introduce interface incompatibilities, compilation-stack conflicts, and silent correctness degradation when integrated into real systems. We introduce FastKernels, a kernel benchmark built around a minimal set of 46 representative architectures spanning 8 categories, whose kernels collectively subsume those of 96.2% (409/425) of HuggingFace Transformers architectures. FastKernels doubles as a minimalistic, production-grade inference framework that runs at parity with hardened systems such as vLLM and SGLang on mainstream LLM serving and substantially exceeds upstream references on under-served architectures; each task's interface mirrors the corresponding module in the state-of-the-art library for its architecture family, enabling direct deployment of optimized kernels into production codebases. Evaluating state-of-the-art kernel agents on FastKernels, we find that even the strongest agent achieves only 0.94$\times$ aggregate speedup over production baselines, with weaker agents at $0.78\times$ and $0.53\times$ -- confirming that benchmark-production misalignment is a critical bottleneck for the field. We release FastKernels as a stepping stone toward kernel agents whose benchmark gains translate directly into production throughput improvements. Code is available at https://github.com/Snowflake-AI-Research/fastkernels |
| title | FastKernels: Benchmarking GPU Kernel Generation in Production |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23215 |