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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On the Limits of Performance Portability in Directive-Based GPU Programming

Alessandro Romeo, Nitin Shukla, Stefano Truzzi, Alessio Suriano 2026-06-14

The problem is that directive-based GPU programming faces fundamental trade-offs between performance, portability, and productivity when transitioning scientific applications to exascale systems. The method involved porting the production-grade magnetohydrodynamics code gPLUTO from OpenACC to OpenMP and evaluating its performance on NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI250X devices. Experimental evidence shows that while OpenACC and OpenMP achieve comparable performance on NVIDIA platforms, the same OpenMP implementation is approximately three times slower at the application level on AMD MI250X, with kernel-level slowdowns reaching up to 47x due to strided memory-access patterns, compiler limitations, and register pressure from C++ abstractions. This matters because it demonstrates that achieving portable performance across GPU architectures requires not only application-level changes but also continued advances in compiler backends and architecture-aware optimization strategies.

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