Efficient tensor computation is a cornerstone of modern deep learning (DL) workloads, yet existing approaches struggle to achieve flexible and performant design and implementation of tensor layouts -- mappings between logical tensors and hardware resources. The increasing complexity of DL algorithms and hardware demands a generic and systematic approach to handling tensor layouts. In this work, we introduce Linear Layouts, a novel approach that models tensor layouts using linear algebra over F2. By representing tensor layouts as binary matrices acting on the bits of the hardware representation, our approach enables a generic layout definition—as opposed to the classical case-by-case approach -- and allows for generic layout-to-layout conversions, eliminating the quadratic explosion that plagues existing solutions. We integrate linear layouts with Triton and demonstrate their effectiveness in optimizing individual Triton operators as well as kernels written in Triton. We also show that linear layouts reduce engineering effort in the compiler backend while fixing several bugs in Triton's legacy layout system.

Domain-Specific languages (DSLs) such as Triton enable developers to write high-performance GPU kernels in a Python-friendly manner; however, profiling these kernels with existing tools often incurs runtime and storage overhead while failing to deliver actionable insights for both kernel authors and framework developers. We present Proton, a multi-level, adaptive profiler tailored for the Triton programming language and compiler. Proton provides frontend APIs to selectively profile relevant regions, aggregate results, capture custom metrics not available through hardware counters, and query profiles using a SQL-like language. Proton’s backend design unifies vendor profiling APIs with instrumentation-based profiling, ensuring portability and extensibility. Using Proton, users are able to query custom and hardware metrics across the relevant levels of abstraction—full end-to-end model execution, isolated neural network layers, language-specific Triton operators, and compiler intermediate representations. We demonstrate the tool’s effectiveness through case studies on production-grade kernel development, continuous integration, multi-GPU analysis, language model inference, and intra-kernel profiling. Our evaluations on end-to-end workloads, as well as standalone Triton kernels, demonstrate that Proton imposes lower runtime overhead and delivers significant reductions in profile sizes relative to existing framework and vendor profilers while being fully open source.

Designing compiler intermediate representations (IRs) is often a manual process that makes exploration and innovation in this space costly. Developers typically use general-purpose programming languages to design IRs. As a result, IR implementations are verbose, manual modifications are expensive, and designing tooling for the inspection or generation of IRs is impractical. While compilers relied historically on a few slowly evolving IRs, domain-specific optimizations and specialized hardware motivate compilers to use and evolve many IRs. We facilitate the implementation of SSA-based IRs by introducing IRDL, a domain-specific language to define IRs. We analyze all 28 domain-specific IRs developed as part of LLVM's MLIR project over the last two years and demonstrate how to express these IRs exclusively in IRDL while only rarely falling back to IRDL's support for generic C++ extensions. By enabling the concise and explicit specification of IRs, we provide foundations for developing effective tooling to automate the compiler construction process.