ChipsThe story, in brief

A Coding Guide to NVIDIA’s Tile-Based GPU Programming: From cuTile and Triton Kernels to Flash Attention

NVIDIA's tile-based GPU programming isn't just faster—it's becoming the standard for inference optimization. Here's how to build with it.

Paper-cut illustration of a coral software window opening into a three-dimensional drafting space.
New tools for building and creating with AI.AI illustration by KeyNews
The KeyNews take

Why it matters

As AI inference costs dominate operational budgets, mastering tile-based GPU programming (cuTile, Triton, Flash Attention) is becoming a core competency for ML engineers. This tutorial bridges the gap between NVIDIA's low-level optimization primitives and production implementation.

The key facts

11 to know
  1. Tutorial covers cuTile backend and Triton kernel fallbacks for hardware compatibility

  2. Core tile programming model: batch data into tiles, load → compute → store

  3. Implementations include vector addition, fused GELU, row-wise softmax, tiled matrix multiplication, flash attention

  4. Validated against PyTorch baselines for correctness

  5. Runnable Colab workflow across different GPU hardware

  6. Addresses inference optimization at the kernel level—relevant to cost reduction strategies

  7. Tutorial covers cuTile backend and Triton kernel implementation

  8. Demonstrates tiled matrix multiplication and flash attention optimization

  9. Addresses hardware fallback strategies (cuTile → Triton on standard Colab GPUs)

  10. Practical Colab workflow for cross-hardware compatibility

  11. Implements core tile-based operations: vector addition, fused GELU, row-wise softmax

Go to the source

MarkTechPostmarktechpost.com

Publisher excerpt: In this tutorial, we explore NVIDIA tile-based GPU programming with TileGym, building a Colab workflow that runs across different hardware. We probe the CUDA environment, try the real cuTile backend, and fall back to Triton when standard Colab GPUs lack the cuTile stack. We learn the core tile…
Read original report
Back to today's editionMore chips news

The wider picture

View all
Paper-cut illustration of an amber microchip with circuit paths extending into a row of data-center cabinets.
AI illustration by KeyNews
Chips01

Google Adds Cycle-Level Kernel Profiling to XProf

A developer-facing tooling improvement that directly enables better TPU utilization and kernel optimization. Practitioners building custom Pallas kernels can now see exactly where cycles are spent, shifting from guesswork to data-driven tuning.

InfoQ AI/ML
Paper-cut illustration of an amber microchip with circuit paths extending into a row of data-center cabinets.
AI illustration by KeyNews
Chips02

Civo unveils first of 40 planned edge data center sites across UK

Edge compute infrastructure is becoming critical for low-latency AI inference and agentic workloads. Civo's distributed network strategy reflects growing demand for regional AI compute capacity outside centralized cloud zones — a structural shift in how AI workloads are deployed.

ITPro
Paper-cut illustration of an amber microchip with circuit paths extending into a row of data-center cabinets.
AI illustration by KeyNews
Chips03

China reviews dependence on Broadcom switches in data centres

China is auditing its reliance on foreign networking hardware for AI data centers as part of a broader push to build domestic alternatives. This reshapes global compute buildout economics and chip supply chains at a moment when AI capacity is the competitive moat.

Financial Times Technology