English

Syncopate: Efficient Multi-GPU AI Kernels via Automatic Chunk-Centric Compute-Communication Overlap

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2026-04-06 v3

Abstract

Communication has become a first-order bottleneck in large-cale GPU workloads, and existing distributed compilers address it mainly by overlapping whole compute and communication kernels at the stream level. This coarse granularity incurs extra kernel launches, forces device-wide synchronizations at kernel boundaries, and leaves substantial slack when the slowest tile or kernel stretches the communication tail. We present Syncopate, a compiler and runtime that enables automatic fine-grained overlap inside a single fused kernel. Syncopate introduces a communication chunk abstraction that decouples communication granularity from kernel structure and backend mechanisms, allowing chunk-level plans to be ported from existing distributed compilers, written directly by users, or instantiated from reusable templates. Given a local Triton kernel and a chunk schedule, Syncopate performs transformations to align computation with chunk availability. Implemented as a source-to-source compiler on Triton, Syncopate delivers an average end-to-end speedup of 1.3×\times and up to 4.7×\times on multi-GPU workloads.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.20595,
  title  = {Syncopate: Efficient Multi-GPU AI Kernels via Automatic Chunk-Centric Compute-Communication Overlap},
  author = {Xinwei Qiang and Yue Guan and Zhengding Hu and Keren Zhou and Yufei Ding and Adnan Aziz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20595},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:23:56.090Z