EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Kun Li 0016
dblp:75/1458-16
· DBLP profile ↗
21ranked-venue papers
6as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-1013-1325ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Systems, architecture and hardware · 20 · 6 first-author · 16 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Redundant Array Computation EliminationabstractRedundancy elimination is a key optimization direction, and loop nests are the main optimization target in modern compilers. Previous work on redundancy elimination of array computations in loop nests either targets specific computation patterns or fails to recognize redundancies with complex structures. This paper proposes RACE (Redundant Array Computation Elimination), a hash-based technique that utilizes a novel two-level scheme to identify the data reuse between array references and the computation redundancies between expressions, enabling hierarchical redundancy detection beyond pattern-specific methods. It traverses the expression trees in loop nests to detect redundancies hierarchically in linear time and generates efficient code with optimized auxiliary arrays that store redundant computation results. Furthermore, RACE supports the expression reassociation with various aggressive strategies to improve the redundancy opportunities. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of RACE. Xianmeng Jiang, Kun Li 0016, Junmin Xiao, Yunquan Zhang |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 4 |
| 2025 | Neuralink: Fast on-Device LLM Inference with Neuron Co-Activation LinkingabstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains, yet deploying them on mobile devices remains an arduous challenge due to their extensive computational and memory demands.While lightweight LLMs have been developed to fit mobile environments, they suffer from degraded model accuracy.In contrast, sparsitybased techniques minimize DRAM usage by selectively transferring only relevant neurons to DRAM while retaining the full model in external storage, such as flash.However, such approaches are critically limited by numerous I/O operations, particularly on smartphones with severe IOPS constraints.In this paper, we propose Neuralink, a novel approach that accelerates LLM inference on smartphones by optimizing neuron placement in flash memory.Neuralink leverages the concept of Neuron Co-Activation, where neurons frequently activated together are linked to facilitate continuous read access and optimize I/O efficiency.Our approach incorporates a two-stage solution: an offline stage that reorganizes neuron placement based on co-activation patterns, and an online stage that employs tailored data access and caching strategies to align well with hardware characteristics.Evaluations conducted on a variety of smartphones and LLMs demonstrate that Neuralink achieves on average 1.49× improvements in end-to-end latency compared to the state-of-the-art.As the first solution to optimize storage placement under sparsity, Neuralink explores a new * Both authors contributed equally to this research. Tuowei Wang, Ruwen Fan, Minxing Huang, Zixu Hao, Kun Li 0016, Ting Cao 0003, Youyou Lu, Yaoxue Zhang, Ju Ren 0001 |
ASPLOS (3) | 5 |
| 2025 | FlashFFTStencil: Bridging Fast Fourier Transforms to Memory-Efficient Stencil Computations on Tensor Core UnitsabstractWhile Tensor Core Units (TCUs) excel in AI tasks, their application to HPC algorithms like stencil computations faces significant challenges due to sparsity, which leads to underutilization and exacerbates memory-bound limitations. This paper introduces FlashFFTStencil1, a memory-efficient stencil computing system designed to bridge FFT to fully-dense stencil computations on TCUs. Aimed at bound shifting, FlashFFTStencil comprises three key techniques: Kernel Tailoring on HBM fuses distinct kernels to enhance parallelism while reducing memory transfer and footprint; Architecture Aligning on SMEM restructures FFT-based stencil computations into dense matrix multiplications tailored for shared memory architecture; Computation Streamlining on TCU optimizes TCU utilization and thread parallelism by minimizing pipeline stalls and maximizing register reuse. Notably, a distinctive extension is FlashFFTStencil's ability to enable theoretically unrestricted temporal fusion by FFT. Results show that FlashFFTStencil achieves effective sparsity-free bound shifting, with an average speedup of 2.57x over the state-of-the-art. FlashFFTStencil pioneers a new era in unifying computational patterns within the HPC landscape and bridges them with cutting-edge AI-driven hardware innovations like TCUs. Haozhi Han, Kun Li 0016, Donglin Bai, Yiwei Zhang 0009, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
PPoPP | 2 |
| 2025 | Jigsaw: Toward Conflict-free Vectorized Stencil Computation by Tessellating Swizzled RegistersabstractStencil computation plays a pivotal role in numerous scientific and engineering applications. Previous studies have extensively investigated vectorization techniques to enhance in-core parallelism; however, the performance bottleneck caused by data alignment conflicts (DAC) has not been effectively resolved in all dimensions. This paper proposes Jigsaw, a conflict-free vectorization method to reduce DAC across all dimensions by tessellating swizzled finest-grained lanes. Jigsaw comprises three key components: Lane-based Butterfly Vectorization, SVD-based Dimension Flattening, and Iteration-based Temporal Merging. These components effectively address DAC across spatial and temporal dimensions. Experimental results on different machines demonstrate that Jigsaw could achieve a significant improvement compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, with an average speedup of 2.31x on various stencil kernels. Yiwei Zhang 0009, Kun Li 0016, Haozhi Han, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
PPoPP | 2 |
| 2025 | Matrix Is All You Need: Rearchitecting Quantum Chemistry to Scale on AI AcceleratorsabstractScientific computing remains fundamentally misaligned with the execution paradigm of modern AI accelerators, which rely on structured, low-precision matrix operations for performance and scalability. Quantum chemistry exemplifies this gap through three core scalability limits: irregular computational patterns, fragmented hardware utilization, and limited scientific reach. Haozhi Han, Kun Li 0016, Fusong Ju, Qi Li 0039, Hong An, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
SC | 2 |
| 2025 | SparStencil: Retargeting Sparse Tensor Cores to Scientific Stencil Computations via Structured Sparsity TransformationabstractSparse Tensor Cores offer exceptional performance gains for AI workloads by exploiting structured 2:4 sparsity. However, their potential remains untapped for core scientific workloads such as stencil computations, which exhibit irregular sparsity patterns. Qi Li 0039, Kun Li 0016, Haozhi Han, Yunquan Zhang, Junshi Chen 0003, Hong An, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
SC | 2 |
| 2025 | JENGA: Enhancing LLM Long-Context Fine-tuning with Contextual Token Sparsity
Tuowei Wang, Kun Li 0016, Ting Cao 0003, Ju Ren 0001, Yaoxue Zhang |
USENIX ATC | 3 |
| 2024 | VNEC: A Vectorized Non-Empty Column Format for SpMV on CPUsabstractSparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is a widely used computational kernel for many applications. The performance of existing vectorization-oriented and locality-optimized SpMV works is limited by increasing additional memory accesses to the output vector or using expensive gather operations. To address these issues, we present the Vectorized Non-Empty Column (VNEC), a novel SpMV storage format aiming to optimize locality and vectorization while alleviating the existing limitations. The VNEC chunks the sparse matrix by rows and removes the empty columns from each row block to improve input vector locality and reduce extra output vector memory access. It can also relieve the cost of expensive gather operations by padding zeros and employing less costly vector load instruction. Specifically, we design two variants of VNEC for different non-zero distributions and propose an effective heuristic selection model by introducing the Intra-Row Density (IRD) to evaluate which variant is suitable for optimizing a given matrix. Experimental results show that in a multicore environment, VNEC achieves up to 6.94× speedup (2.10× on average) against the standard MKL SpMV routine on the x86 CPU and up to 5.92× speedup (1.73× on average) over ArmPL on the ARM CPU. We emphasize that the VNEC format is practical for real-world iterative applications because of its low preprocessing overhead for format conversion. Haipeng Jia, Lei Xu 0023, Cunyang Wei, Kun Li 0016, Xianmeng Jiang, Yunquan Zhang |
IPDPS | 5 |
| 2024 | ConvStencil: Transform Stencil Computation to Matrix Multiplication on Tensor CoresabstractTensor Core Unit (TCU) is increasingly integrated into modern high-performance processors to enhance matrix multiplication performance. However, constrained to its over-specification, its potential for improving other critical scientific operations like stencil computations remains untapped. Yuetao Chen, Kun Li 0016, Donglin Bai, Lei Wang 0222, Lingxiao Ma, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
PPoPP | 2 |
| 2024 | Long Exposure: Accelerating Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for LLMs under Shadowy SparsityabstractThe adaptation of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to diverse downstream tasks via fine-tuning is critical for numerous applications. However, the inefficiency of parameterefficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques presents significant challenges in terms of time investments and operational costs. In this paper, we first introduce a nuanced form of sparsity, termed Shadowy Sparsity, which is distinctive in fine-tuning and has not been adequately addressed for acceleration. Under Shadowy Sparsity, we propose Long Exposure1, an efficient system to accelerate PEFT for LLMs. Long Exposure comprises three key components: Shadowy-sparsity Exposer employs a prolonged sensing range to capture more sparsity details under shadowy sparsity; Sequence-oriented Predictor provides efficient yet accurate predictions to handle large sequence inputs and constantly-evolving parameters; and Dynamic-aware Operator facilitates more structured computational patterns and coalesced memory accesses, addressing dynamic sparse operations. Extensive evaluations show that Long Exposure outperforms state-of-the-arts with up to a $2.49 \times$ speedup in end-to-end fine-tuning, offering promising advancements in accelerating PEFT for LLMs.1Long Exposure is available at https://github.com/HPHEX/LongExposure. Tuowei Wang, Kun Li 0016, Zixu Hao, Donglin Bai, Ju Ren 0001, Yaoxue Zhang, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
SC | 2 |
| 2024 | LoRAStencil: Low-Rank Adaptation of Stencil Computation on Tensor CoresabstractStencil computations play a pivotal role in numerous scientific and industrial applications, yet their efficient execution on specialized hardware accelerators like Tensor Core Units (TCUs) remains a challenge. This paper introduces LoRAStencil1, a novel stencil computing system designed to mitigate memory access redundancies on TCUs through low-rank adaptation. We first identify a nuanced form of this redundancy, dimension residue, specific to TCUs. Then LoRAStencil leverages orchestrated mathematical transformations to decompose stencil weight matrices into smaller rank-1 matrices, facilitating efficient data gathering along residual dimensions. It comprises three key components: memory-efficient Residual Dimension Gathering to facilitate more data reuse, compute-saving Pyramidal Matrix Adaptation to exploit the inherent low-rank characteristics, and performance-boosting Butterfly Vector Swapping to circumvent all data shuffles. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that LoRAStencil address dimension residues effectively, which outperforms state-of-the-arts with up to a 2.16x speedup, offering promising advancements for efficient tensorized stencil computation on TCUs by Low-Rank Adaptation. Yiwei Zhang 0009, Kun Li 0016, Jiawen Cheng, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao 0003, Mao Yang 0004 |
SC | 2 |
| 2023 | OpenFFT: An Adaptive Tuning Framework for 3D FFT on ARM Multicore CPUsabstractThe sophisticated hierarchy and shared characteristics of cache in multicore CPU architectures bring challenges to the performance improvement of fundamental algorithms, especially in implementing and optimizing 3D FFT. 3D FFT is a memory-bounded algorithm that contains many highly discretized memory accesses. With the working set scaling, the data locality becomes poor, which is prone to cause serious memory access overhead, especially for high-dimensional data transposition. This paper proposes a 3D FFT optimization framework named OpenFFT. This framework optimizes the memory access of 3D FFT by the following methods, including 1) A novel tiling algorithm, Z-OpenFFT, based on the column-order algorithm for high-dimensional vectorization to improve data locality and eliminate transposition; 2) An efficient search algorithm Section-cache-aware algorithm to optimize the memory access of butterfly network of 1D FFT; 3) A multi-thread allocation model by analyzing the characteristics of cache hierarchy and task size to allocate threads adaptively. Experiments demonstrate that OpenFFT could obtain a more competitive performance than the best configuration of FFTW and ARMPL on ARM CPUs. Tun Chen, Haipeng Jia, Yunquan Zhang, Kun Li 0016, Zhihao Li 0001, Jianyu Yao, Chendi Li |
ICS | 4 |
| 2023 | AGCM-3DLF: Accelerating Atmospheric General Circulation Model via 3-D Parallelization and Leap-FormatabstractThe atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) has been an important research tool in the study of climate change for decades. As the demand for high-resolution simulation is becoming urgent, the scalability and simulation efficiency is faced with great challenges, especially for the latitude-longitude mesh-based models. In this paper, we propose a highly scalable 3-D atmospheric general circulation model based on leap-format, namely AGCM-3DLF. First, it utilizes a 3-D decomposition method allowing for parallelism release in all three physical dimensions. Then the leap-format difference computation scheme is adopted to maintain computational stability in grid updating and avoid additional filtering at the high latitudes. A novel shifting window communication algorithm is designed for parallelization of the unified model. Furthermore, a series of optimizations are conducted to improve the effectiveness of large-scale simulations. Experiment results in different platforms demonstrate good efficiency and scalability of the model. AGCM-3DLF scales up to the entire CAS-Xiandao1 supercomputer (196,608 CPU cores), attaining the speed of 11.1 simulation-year-per-day (SYPD) at a high resolution of 25KM. In addition, simulations conducted on the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer exhibit a 1.06 million cores scalability with 36.1% parallel efficiency. He Zhang 0005, Yunquan Zhang, Baodong Wu, Kun Li 0016, Shigang Li 0002, Pengqi Lu, Junmin Xiao |
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. | 6 |
| 2022 | An Efficient Vectorization Scheme for Stencil ComputationabstractStencil computation is one of the most important kernels in various scientific and engineering applications. A variety of work has focused on vectorization and tiling techniques, aiming at exploiting the in-core data parallelism and data locality respectively. In this paper, the downsides of existing vectorization schemes are analyzed. Briefly, they either incur data alignment conflicts or hurt the data locality when integrated with tiling. Then we propose a novel transpose layout to preserve the data locality for tiling and reduce the data reorganization overhead for vectorization simultaneously. To further improve the data reuse at the register level, a time loop unroll-and-jam strategy is designed to perform multistep stencil computation along the time dimension. Experimental results on the AVX2 and AVX-S12 CPUs show that our approach obtains a competitive performance with the classic vectorization methods (Auto Vectorization and Data Reorganization), state-of-the-art compilers (Pluto and SDSL), and highly-optimized work (DLT and Tessellation). Kun Li 0016, Yunquan Zhang, Yue Yue |
IPDPS | 1 |
| 2022 | An Accurate and Efficient Large-Scale Regression Method Through Best Friend ClusteringabstractAs the data size in Machine Learning fields grows exponentially, it is inevitable to accelerate the computation by utilizing the ever-growing large number of available cores provided by high-performance computing hardware. However, existing parallel methods for clustering or regression often suffer from problems of low accuracy, slow convergence, and complex hyperparameter-tuning. Furthermore, the parallel efficiency is usually difficult to improve while striking a balance between preserving model properties and partitioning computing workloads on distributed systems. In this paper, we propose a novel and simple data structure capturing the most important information among data samples. It has several advantageous properties supporting a hierarchical clustering strategy that contains well-defined metrics for determining optimal hierarchy, balanced partition for maintaining the clustering property, and efficient parallelization for accelerating computation phases. Then we combine the clustering with regression techniques as a parallel library and utilize a hybrid structure of data and model parallelism to make predictions. Experiments illustrate that our library obtains remarkable performance on convergence, accuracy, and scalability. Kun Li 0016, Yunquan Zhang, Gongwei Chen |
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. | 1 |
| 2021 | Reducing redundancy in data organization and arithmetic calculation for stencil computationsabstractStencil computation is one of the most important kernels in various scientific and engineering applications. A variety of work has focused on vectorization techniques, aiming at exploiting the in-core data parallelism. However, they either incur spatial data conflicts or hurt the data locality when integrated with tiling. In this paper, a novel spatial computation folding is devised to reduce the data reorganization overhead for vectorization and preserve the data locality for tiling in the data space simultaneously. We then propose an approach of temporal computation folding enhanced with shifts reusing, tessellate tiling, and semi-automatic code generation. It aims to further reduce the redundancy of arithmetic calculations and exploit the register reuse along the time dimension. Experimental results on the AVX2 and AVX-512 CPUs show that our approach obtains significant performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art techniques. Kun Li 0016, Yunquan Zhang, Yue Yue |
SC | 1 |
| 2021 | Temporal vectorization for stencilsabstractStencil computations represent a very common class of nested loops in scientific and engineering applications. Exploiting vector units in modern CPUs is crucial to achieving peak performance. Previous vectorization approaches often consider the data space, in particular the innermost unit-strided loop. It leads to the well-known data alignment conflict problem that vector loads are overlapped due to the data sharing between continuous stencil computations. This paper proposes a novel temporal vectorization scheme for stencils. It vectorizes the stencil computation in the iteration space and assembles points with different time coordinates in one vector. The temporal vectorization leads to a small fixed number of vector reorganizations that is irrelevant to the vector length, stencil order, and dimension. Furthermore, it is also applicable to Gauss-Seidel stencils, whose vectorization is not well-studied. The effectiveness of the temporal vectorization is demonstrated by various Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel stencils. Yunquan Zhang, Kun Li 0016, Pengqi Lu, Yue Yue |
SC | 4 |
| 2020 | FastNBL: fast neighbor lists establishment for molecular dynamics simulation based on bitwise operations
Kun Li 0016, Shigang Li 0002, Yunquan Zhang |
J. Supercomput. | 1 |
| 2019 | OpenKMC: a KMC design for hundred-billion-atom simulation using millions of cores on Sunway TaihulightabstractWith more attention attached to nuclear energy, the formation mechanism of the solute clusters precipitation within complex alloys becomes intriguing research in the embrittlement of nuclear reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels. Such phenomenon can be simulated with atomic kinetic Monte Carlo (AKMC) software, which evaluates the interactions of solute atoms with point defects in metal alloys. In this paper, we propose OpenKMC to accelerate large-scale KMC simulations on Sunway many-core architecture. To overcome the constraints caused by complex many-core architecture, we employ six levels of optimization in OpenKMC: (1) a new efficient potential computation model; (2) a group reaction strategy for fast event selection; (3) a software cache strategy; (4) combined communication optimizations; (5) a Transcription-Translation-Transmission algorithm for many-core optimization; (6) vectorization acceleration. Experiments illustrate that our OpenKMC has high accuracy and good scalability of applying hundred-billion-atom simulation over 5.2 million cores with a performance of over 80.1% parallel efficiency. Kun Li 0016, Honghui Shang, Yunquan Zhang, Shigang Li 0002, Baodong Wu, Dexun Chen, Zhiqiang Wei 0004 |
SC | 1 |
| 2019 | Correction to: FastNBL: fast neighbor lists establishment for molecular dynamics simulation based on bitwise operations
Kun Li 0016, Shigang Li 0002, Yunquan Zhang |
J. Supercomput. | 1 |
| 2018 | Communication-Avoiding for Dynamical Core of Atmospheric General Circulation ModelabstractDynamical core is one of the most time-consuming parts in the global atmospheric general circulation model, which is widely used for the numerical simulation of the dynamic evolution process of global atmosphere. Due to its complicated calculation procedures and the non-uniformity of latitude-longitude mesh, the parallelization suffers from high communication overhead. In this paper, we deduce the operator form of the calculating flow in the dynamical core. Furthermore, it is abstracted out that the stencil and collection alternate action is the basic operation in the dynamic core. Based on the operator form of the calculation flow, we propose the corresponding optimization strategy for each operator. In the end, we develop a communication-avoiding algorithm to reduce communication overhead in the dynamic core. Our experiments show that the communication-avoiding algorithm reduces the total runtime by 54% at most for a 50 km resolution model running 10 years. Especially for communication reduction, the new algorithm achieves 1.4x speedup on average for the collective communication and 3.9x speedup on average for the communication involved in the stencil computation. Junmin Xiao, Shigang Li 0002, Baodong Wu, He Zhang 0005, Kun Li 0016, Erlin Yao, Yunquan Zhang, Guangming Tan |
ICPP | 5 |