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composable_kernel/include/ck_tile
Emily Martins 314fcbb3ff [CK_TILE] Reduce Register Spills in Stream-K Reductions (#4984)
## Motivation

In CK Tile Stream-K, kernels using one of two non-atomic reduction
strategies (i.e., linear, tree) have high register spill count, with the
tree reduction generally being worse. These changes act a first step to
help decrease the register spill count.

## Technical Details
### Problem 1: Unvectorized access to partials
In both the linear and tree reductions, workgroups write partials
results to a global buffer; another workgroup will later read this data.
When the initial logic to support reading and writing to the partials
buffer was added (see
https://github.com/ROCm/composable_kernel/pull/3107), the tile
distribution encoding used to read from and write to partials matches
the register layout for the accumulator of the mfma instruction used for
the kernel. Since we do not currently use the transposed register layout
for the accumulator, we end with an encoding that is not optimized for
writing to HBM.

For example: Consider the register layout of the
`v_mfma_f32_16x16x32_fp8_fp8` instruction.
```bash
./matrix_calculator.py --architecture gfx942 --instruction  v_mfma_f32_16x16x32_fp8_fp8 --register-layout --C-matrix
```
<img width="1113" height="537" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/afc8f556-08cc-4224-a6e5-b5edabc5fc02"
/>

The above shows that threads are responsible for consecutive elements
down a column of the C tile. If we use this distribution to read and
write to partials with C in row major, then threads are unable to
perform vectorized reads and writes. Note: thread 0 is shown in red and
thread 1 is shown in green.

Since the C-shuffle Epilogue only supports C in row major, reading and
writing to partials is highly unoptimized.
### Problem 2: Missed opportunity for SPGR use in tree reduction loop
Since the reduction occurs between workgroups, all threads in the
workgroup follow the same execution paths in the tree reduction logic,
hence various variables should be using SGPRs, but they are not.

### Implemented Solutions
1. Add a new tile distribution encoding that is optimized for accessing
partials in HBM. This encoding does not change the data assignment to
threads, it merely changes the addresses to which they write/read in the
partials buffer. For example, continuing with the
`v_mfma_f32_16x16x32_fp8_fp8` instruction, the new encoding would result
in threads writing in the following layout:
<img width="517" height="342" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/93b5e0ea-bafc-47b8-89bb-c40ba75cb202"
/>

This layout ensures that each thread writes along a row, enabling
`buffer_{store|load}_dwordx4` instructions (i.e., vectorized accesses).
This helps reduce register usage due to requiring fewer offset
calculations.

2. To force SGPR usage in the tree reduction loop, I make use of CK
Tile's `amd_wave_read_first_lane` which is a wrapper around
`__builtin_amdgcn_readfirstlane`. This helps reduce VGPR spills in the
tree reduction.


_These changes do not fully eliminate register spills. Future work will
aim to further reduce spills. But these changes make good progress._

## Test Plan

Added tests for different warp tile sizes to validate that the new
encoding works with different `WarpGemm` variants.

## Test Result

All tests pass locally on all gfx9 architectures.

Some results for decreases in register spills on gfx942: (BL = baseline)
| Kernel | SGPR Spill (BL) | SGPR Spill (new) | SGPR Delta | SGPR % |
VGPR Spill (BL) | VGPR Spill (new) | VGPR Delta | VGPR % |

|--------|------------------:|------------------:|-----------:|-------:|-------------------:|------------------:|-----------:|-------:|
| fp16 linear F/F/F/T 256x256x32 2x2x1 32x32x16 | 223 | 0 | -223 |
-100.0% | 21 | 20 | -1 | -4.8% |
| fp16 tree F/F/F/T 256x256x32 2x2x1 32x32x16 | 233 | 11 | -222 | -95.3%
| 443 | 23 | -420 | -94.8% |
| fp8 linear F/F/F/F 256x256x32 2x2x1 32x32x32 | 221 | 3 | -218 | -98.6%
| 12 | 6 | -6 | -50.0% |
| fp8 tree F/F/F/F 256x256x32 2x2x1 32x32x32 | 230 | 14 | -216 | -93.9%
| 396 | 12 | -384 | -97.0% |


## Submission Checklist

- [x] Look over the contributing guidelines at
https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md#pull-requests.
2026-03-02 10:39:48 -07:00
..
2024-12-12 11:54:03 +08:00

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Composable Kernel Tile

concept

ck_tile provides a programming model with templated abstractions to enable users to implement performance-critical kernels for machine learning workloads. introduces following basic concepts to help users building your own operator

  • tensor coordinate transformation, this is the core concept of layout/index transform abstraction in both compiler time and run time.
  • tile-based programming model, including tile-level api and the concept of distributed tensor.

ck_tile is independently from the old ck, located under /include/ck_tile. You don't need to include anything from old CK, ck_tile has similiar (indeed almost the same) implementations for users to build operators. We will have a transition period to pull everything from old ck into ck_tile, stay tuned.

component

ck_tile is splitted into several componenets including core, host, ops/gemm, ops/fmha... each component you only need to include a single header (e.g #include "ck_tile/core.hpp", #include "ck_tile/ops/fmha.hpp") then you are able to use the function/structure inside (different from old ck)

[core]
ck_tile/core contains all the basic data structure and function to build the kernel, you can only include this header and build your own operators that utilizing all the basic building blocks introduced in ck.

core/container

  • array, store runtime variables with fixed length (tensor index, register buffer, etc...)
  • tuple, same as std::tuple, hold different type of data, and one of the solution to achieve multiple buffer.
  • sequence, compile time integer sequence used to build various internal structures, or to describe tile size
  • other convenient structure build on top of above 3

core/numeric

  • gpu data type like fp16_t, bf16_t, fp8_t... and the conversion between each other
  • constexpr integer similiar to std::integral_constant to be used as compile time integer.
  • math functions and numeric utilities

core/algorithm

  • coordinate transformation system, used to build tensor transform and compile time indexing. This is the core idea introduced in old ck to describe how a tensor is build by several basic transform primitives like merge/unmerge/embed etc... and how we indexing into a ND tensor that finally mapped to 1D memory offset.

core/tensor

  • tensor descriptor, to describe how a ND tensor
  • distributed tensor, describe the storage of this tensor, and the distribution of how a collection of threads collaborately work for this tensor.
  • tile level API, including load_tile, store_tile, shuffle_tile, slice_tile, etc...

[host]
ck_tile/host contains all the host side utilities to launch a kernel, create the device buffer, and some reference implementations. This can be used to create examples (like that under ck_tile example folder) and simple executable to invoke this kernel, so if you only need ck_tile to build your own device library then it's OK to not include this. Based on this, it is recommended to include the specific header you needed under this folder to avoid including unwanted headers (e.g, only include ck_tile/host/kernel_launch.hpp), unless you are writing a host executable.

[ops/gemm, ops/fmha, ops/reduce...]
our implementation of different device operators.

  • warp, warp tile level operator
  • block, block tile level operator
  • pipeline, pipeline that can achieve a customized tile level mainloop (or epilogue). By switching different pipeline to the kernel template you can have different kind of pipeline optimizations.
  • kernel, template interface for users to instantiate a particular kernel

[ops/epilogue]
epilogue part of our kernel. We may extend this epilogue part to let users to build their own cutomized epilogues.

[ref]
reference implementation of cpu or gpu. This folder is supposed to include a specific header on demand.

examples

currently we put all ck_tile related example under /example/ck_tile folder. Please check each example's subfolder.