Eidola: Modeling Multi-GPU Network Communication Traffic in Distributed AI Workloads

Ranganath R. Selagamsetty, Matthew Poremba, Bradford M. Beckmann, Joshua San Miguel 2026-06-14

Eidola addresses the problem of modeling irregular and transient inter-GPU communication traffic in distributed AI workloads, which existing tools fail to capture due to fine-grained synchronization and peer-to-peer writes. The method introduces a scalable gem5 extension that uses annotated timing profiles from real applications to emulate peer-to-peer GPU writes with cycle-level precision. Experimental evidence demonstrates Eidola's effectiveness by reproducing variability in fused kernel execution and confirming reductions in polling-related memory traffic via a SyncMon-inspired mechanism. This matters because Eidola provides a flexible platform for architectural exploration of interconnect bandwidth and latency in modern multi-GPU systems.

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Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

Fabio Pasqualetti, Taosha Guo 2026-06-14

The problem is that softmax attention requires exponentiation and global reduction, which are energy-expensive on von Neumann hardware and lack a natural physical analog. The method replaces softmax with Kuramoto synchronization dynamics, where queries are fixed anchors on a sphere and free oscillators equilibrate to encode attention weights via cosine similarity. Experimental evidence shows that at oscillator dimension 2, oscillator attention outperforms softmax on keyword spotting (+1.00 pp) and subject-verb agreement (+5.27 pp), while on causal language modeling it closes the perplexity gap as dimension increases, from +11.09 to +2.98 on WikiText-2 and from +2.39 to +0.57 on TinyStories. This matters because it provides a mathematically grounded blueprint for accurate attention on energy-constrained physical substrates without requiring exponentiation or global reduction.

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