EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Vijay Thakkar
dblp:222/2985
· DBLP profile ↗
6ranked-venue papers
0as first author
5since 2021 · last 2024
0000-0002-6158-6127ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Systems, architecture and hardware · 4 · 3 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precisionabstractAttention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. elaborated an approach to speed up attention on GPUs through minimizing memory reads/writes. However, it has yet to take advantage of new capabilities present in recent hardware, with FlashAttention-2 achieving only 35% utilization on the H100 GPU.
We develop three main techniques to speed up attention on Hopper GPUs: exploiting asynchrony of the Tensor Cores and TMA to (1) overlap overall computation and data movement via warp-specialization and (2) interleave block-wise matmul and softmax operations, and (3) block quantization and incoherent processing that leverages hardware support for FP8 low-precision. We demonstrate that our method, FlashAttention-3, achieves speedup on H100 GPUs by 1.5-2.0$\times$ with BF16 reaching up to 840 TFLOPs/s (85\% utilization), and with FP8 reaching 1.3 PFLOPs/s. We validate that FP8 FlashAttention-3 achieves 2.6$\times$ lower numerical error than a baseline FP8 attention. Jay Shah, Ganesh Bikshandi, Vijay Thakkar, Pradeep Ramani, Tri Dao |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2024 | fVDB : A Deep-Learning Framework for Sparse, Large Scale, and High Performance Spatial IntelligenceabstractWe present f VDB, a novel GPU-optimized framework for deep learning on large-scale 3D data. f VDB provides a complete set of differentiable primitives to build deep learning architectures for common tasks in 3D learning such as convolution, pooling, attention, ray-tracing, meshing, etc. f VDB simultaneously provides a much larger feature set (primitives and operators) than established frameworks with no loss in efficiency: our operators match or exceed the performance of other frameworks with narrower scope. Furthermore, f VDB can process datasets with much larger footprint and spatial resolution than prior works, while providing a competitive memory footprint on small inputs. To achieve this combination of versatility and performance, f VDB relies on a single novel VDB index grid acceleration structure paired with several key innovations including GPU accelerated sparse grid construction, convolution using tensorcores, fast ray tracing kernels using a Hierarchical Digital Differential Analyzer algorithm (HDDA), and jagged tensors. Our framework is fully integrated with PyTorch enabling interoperability with existing pipelines, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on a number of representative tasks such as large-scale point-cloud segmentation, high resolution 3D generative modeling, unbounded scale Neural Radiance Fields, and large-scale point cloud reconstruction. Francis Williams, Jonathan Swartz, Gergely Klár, Vijay Thakkar, Matthew Cong, Xuanchi Ren, Ruilong Li, Clement Fuji-Tsang, Sanja Fidler, Eftychios Sifakis, Ken Museth |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 5 |
| 2022 | Exaflops Biomedical Knowledge Graph AnalyticsabstractWe are motivated by newly proposed methods for mining large-scale corpora of scholarly publications (e.g., full biomedical literature), which consists of tens of millions of papers spanning decades of research. In this setting, analysts seek to discover relationships among concepts. They construct graph representations from annotated text databases and then formulate the relationship-mining problem as an all-pairs shortest paths (APSP) and validate connective paths against curated biomedical knowledge graphs (e.g., Spoke). In this context, we present Coast (Exascale Communication-Optimized All-Pairs Shortest Path) and demonstrate 1.004 EF/s on 9,200 Frontier nodes (73,600 GCDs). We develop hyperbolic performance models (HYPERMOD), which guide optimizations and parametric tuning. The proposed Coast algorithm achieved the memory constant parallel efficiency of 99% in the single-precision tropical semiring. Looking forward, Coast will enable the integration of scholarly corpora like PubMed into the Spoke biomedical knowledge graph. Ramakrishnan Kannan, Piyush Sao, Hao Lu 0001, Jakub Kurzak, Gundolf Schenk, Yongmei Shi, Seung-Hwan Lim, Sharat Israni, Vijay Thakkar, Guojing Cong, Robert M. Patton, Sergio Baranzini, Richard W. Vuduc, Thomas E. Potok |
SC | 9 |
| 2022 | Critique of "MemXCT: Memory-Centric X-Ray CT Reconstruction With Massive Parallelization" by SCC Team From Georgia TechabstractFor the 2020 Student Cluster Competition, we reproduced results from “MemXCT: Memory-Centric X-ray CT Reconstruction with Massive Parallelization” (Hidayetoğluet al.). Reproducibility is of critical importance to the scientific community, not just to verify correctness of results but also to see how easily others can understand and work with the given methods. MemXCT is an approach for image reconstruction in X-ray ptychography, which has a broad range of applications in materials science. MemXCT is not the only X-ray tomography algorithm, though; as opposed to compute-centric algorithms, it is designed to scale better by optimizing for memory bandwidth and memory latency. MemXCT also applies several key optimizations in order to ease memory pressure. In this article, we test the performance and strong scaling of MemXCT on 1 to 256 AMD CPU cores (1-4 nodes) and 1-16 Nvidia V100 GPUs (1-4 nodes). We confirm the impact of MemXCT’s optimizations. Still, we find that the performance of some important loops in the MemXCT kernel is much lower on the AMD processors (with AVX2) of our CPU nodes compared to the Intel CPUs (with AVX-512) used in the original article. We also confirm MemXCT performance on Tesla V100 GPUs, as reported in the article. Nicole Prindle, Ali Kazmi, Aman Jain, Albert Chen 0003, Marissa Sorkin, Sudhanshu Agarwal, Richard W. Vuduc, Vijay Thakkar |
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. | 8 |
| 2021 | Scalable All-pairs Shortest Paths for Huge Graphs on Multi-GPU ClustersabstractWe present an optimized Floyd-Warshall (Floyd-Warshall) algorithm that computes the All-pairs shortest path (APSP) for GPU accelerated clusters. The Floyd-Warshall algorithm due to its structural similarities to matrix-multiplication is well suited for highly parallel GPU architectures. To achieve high parallel efficiency, we address two key algorithmic challenges: reducing high communication overhead and addressing limited GPU memory. To reduce high communication costs, we redesign the parallel (a) to expose more parallelism, (b) aggressively overlap communication and computation with pipelined and asynchronous scheduling of operations, and (c) tailored MPI-collective. To cope with limited GPU memory, we employ an offload model, where the data resides on the host and is transferred to GPU on-demand. The proposed optimizations are supported with detailed performance models for tuning. Our optimized parallel Floyd-Warshall implementation is up to 5x faster than a strong baseline and achieves 8.1 PetaFLOPS/sec on 256~nodes of the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This performance represents 70% of the theoretical peak and 80% parallel efficiency. The offload algorithm can handle 2.5x larger graphs with a 20% increase in overall running time. Piyush Sao, Hao Lu 0001, Ramakrishnan Kannan, Vijay Thakkar, Richard W. Vuduc, Thomas E. Potok |
HPDC | 4 |
| 2020 | Scalable knowledge graph analytics at 136 petaflop/sabstractWe are motivated by newly proposed methods for data mining large-scale corpora of scholarly publications, such as the full biomedical literature, which may consist of tens of millions of papers spanning decades of research. In this setting, analysts seek to discover how concepts relate to one another. They construct graph representations from annotated text databases and then formulate the relationship-mining problem as one of computing all-pairs shortest paths (APSP), which becomes a significant bottleneck. In this context, we present a new high-performance algorithm and implementation of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm for distributed-memory parallel computers accelerated by GPUs, which we call DSNAPSHOT (Distributed Accelerated Semiring All-Pairs Shortest Path). For our largest experiments, we ran DSNAPSHOT on a connected input graph with millions of vertices using 4, 096nodes (24,576GPUs) of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Summit supercomputer system. We find DSNAPSHOT achieves a sustained performance of $136\times 10^{15}$ floating-point operations per second (136petaflop/s) at a parallel efficiency of 90% under weak scaling and, in absolute speed, 70% of the best possible performance given our computation (in the single-precision tropical semiring or “min-plus” algebra). Looking forward, we believe this novel capability will enable the mining of scholarly knowledge corpora when embedded and integrated into artificial intelligence-driven natural language processing workflows at scale. Ramakrishnan Kannan, Piyush Sao, Hao Lu 0001, Drahomira Herrmannova, Vijay Thakkar, Robert M. Patton, Richard W. Vuduc, Thomas E. Potok |
SC | 5 |