paper(exec-summary): edit-pass through Executive Summary done

- Title: "Hardware-Software Codesign for Grouped-Query Attention on AHBM"
  (drop "Attention-Centric LLM Kernels" framing; subtitle pillars removed)
- Authors: Mukesh Garg, Jiyoon Lee, Yangwook Kang
- Affiliation: System Technology Group, AGI Computing Lab — 2026 1H
- Executive Summary rewritten into a tight three-paragraph structure:
  (1) GQA motivation + three AHBM architectural requirements (placement,
      inter-PE comm, pipelined memory-compute);
  (2) three matching HW-SW co-design mechanisms (GQA-aware placement,
      PE_IPCQ, composite-command GEMM under PE_SCHEDULER) and headline
      results (38% / 25-35% / 78%), closing on efficient HBM-bandwidth use;
  (3) broader applicability across the AHBM software stack.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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\graphicspath{{figures/}}
\title{\textbf{Hardware--Software Codesign for Attention-Centric\\
LLM Kernels: GEMM, Collective Communication, and\\
Fused Grouped-Query Attention}}
\author{KernBench Team}
\date{2026 First Half (1H)}
\title{\textbf{Hardware--Software Co-Design for Grouped-Query Attention on AHBM}}
\author{Mukesh Garg \and Jiyoon Lee \and Yangwook Kang}
\date{
\small
AGI Computing Lab, System Technology Group\\
H1 2026
}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
@@ -1,39 +1,33 @@
\section*{Executive Summary}
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Executive Summary}
This report studies how to make attention-centric LLM kernels fast through
hardware--software codesign, using KernBench, a discrete-event simulator
that runs kernels at the source level---without a compiler or other
software-stack dependency---so that algorithm-level optimizations and the
hardware features that support them can be isolated and measured.
Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) has largely replaced GPT-3-style
multi-head attention in modern decoder-only LLMs (e.g., Llama 3 and
Mistral) due to its reduced memory and bandwidth requirements. Mapping
GQA efficiently onto AHBM introduces three architectural requirements:
optimized placement of KV caches and weights to minimize inter-PE
communication, low-overhead support for unavoidable cross-PE traffic,
and efficient pipelining of memory accesses and computation within each
PE.
The 1H work centers on attention. Building on prior multi-head-attention
work, we target FlashAttention-style Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) and find
that a fast fused attention kernel rests on two enabling optimizations,
each studied in its own right and then combined inside the fused kernel:
a \textbf{composite command} that issues a tiled GEMM as a single,
self-routing pipeline, and \textbf{PE\_IPCQ}, a per-PE on-device collective
engine for all-reduce.
To address these requirements, this report introduces three
hardware--software co-design mechanisms: GQA-aware placement
of KV caches and weights across TCM, SRAM, and HBM; PE\_IPCQ,
an efficient on-device collective communication primitive; and a
composite-command GEMM pipeline that tightly pipelines memory
and compute operations within each PE under PE\_SCHEDULER control.
Kernbench-based evaluation show up to \SI{38}{\percent} lower collective
communication overhead, \SIrange{25}{35}{\percent} lower all-reduce
latency than a mesh-based interconnect, and up to \SI{78}{\percent} of
peak MAC efficiency for compute-intensive GEMM kernels. These results
demonstrate that the fused GQA kernel can efficiently exploit AHBM's HBM bandwidth.
The measured results form a single, consistent story. For GEMM, the
composite command lets compute-rich shapes reach
\textasciitilde\SI{78}{\percent} of peak MAC efficiency, with the simulator's
measured efficiency tracking the analytic prediction within
\SIrange{10}{20}{\percent}---both a performance result and a validation of
the latency model. For all-reduce, PE\_IPCQ delivers on-device collectives
whose latency tracks the interconnect's physical limits; a 2D-torus
inter-device fabric is \SI{20}{}--\SI{25}{\percent} faster than a mesh or
ring at scale, and staging the collective in on-PE TCM rather than HBM or
SRAM saves a further \SI{14}{}--\SI{38}{\percent}. For fused GQA, the two
enablers combine: because the composite command keeps the MAC array nearly
idle, the kernel is exposed as overwhelmingly data-movement bound---the DMA
engine outweighs the compute engines by two to three orders of magnitude,
and on-device IPCQ reduction traffic scales with users and devices.
\textbf{Bottom line.} For an attention-dominated decoder, the hardware
changes worth keeping are the ones that move and reduce data faster: the
single-command self-routing GEMM pipeline (which makes the MAC array
usable and exposes the real bottleneck), the on-device PE\_IPCQ collective
with its compute/communication virtual-channel split, fast on-PE staging
memory, and wrap-around (torus) inter-device links. Additional raw MAC
throughput is not the limiting factor for this workload.
While GQA serves as the motivating workload in this study, the
resulting architectural mechanisms are broadly applicable across the
AHBM software stack. PE\_IPCQ provides a scalable communication
substrate for collective operations and communication-intensive workloads, while
composite-command execution enables efficient fusion of memory
movement, GEMM kernels, normalization, and other element-wise
operations. Together with the hierarchical data-placement framework,
these capabilities form a reusable foundation for future AI kernels
and communication libraries on AHBM.