AI Systems Performance Engineering code, tooling, and resources for the O'Reilly book covering GPU optimization, distributed training, inference scaling, and full-stack performance tuning for modern AI workloads.

O'Reilly Book – Fall 2025
Available on Amazon

The book ships with a 175+ item performance checklist covering the entire lifecycle:

• ✅ Performance tuning mindset and cost optimization
• ✅ Reproducibility and documentation best practices
• ✅ System architecture and hardware planning
• ✅ Operating system and driver optimizations
• ✅ GPU programming and CUDA tuning
• ✅ Distributed training and network optimization
• ✅ Efficient inference and serving
• ✅ Power and thermal management
• ✅ Latest profiling tools and techniques
• ✅ Architecture-specific optimizations

• Book: AI Systems Performance Engineering on Amazon
• Meetup: AI Performance Engineering
• YouTube: AI Performance Engineering Channel

Built in San Francisco for the AI performance engineering community

• GPU Architecture, PyTorch, CUDA, and OpenAI Triton Programming
• Distributed Training & Inference
• Memory Optimization & Profiling
• PyTorch Performance Tuning
• Multi-Node Scaling Strategies

• NVIDIA GPU with CUDA support
• Python 3.8+
• PyTorch with CUDA
• Docker (optional)

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/your-repo/ai-performance-engineering.git
cd ai-performance-engineering

# Install dependencies for a specific chapter
cd code/ch1
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run examples
python performance_basics.py

# Profiling-friendly workloads
# Most examples use modest tensor sizes and short iteration counts so Nsight
# Systems, Nsight Compute, and the PyTorch profiler finish quickly. Increase the
# sizes if you need larger-scale numbers.

The repository targets NVIDIA Blackwell B200/B300 (SM100). CUDA builds, Nsight workflows, and PyTorch stacks assume CUDA 12.9, PyTorch 2.9 nightlies, and Triton 3.4. Helper scripts keep everything aligned:

# Build CUDA samples and run sanity checks
./code/build_all.sh

# Profile the entire codebase with Nsight + PyTorch profiler
python scripts/profile_harness.py --profile nsys --profile pytorch --output-root profiles/full_run

# Reset generated profiling artifacts
./clean_profiles.sh

For environment variables, validation scripts, and hardware guidance, see docs/environment.md.

• PyTorch 2.9: Enhanced compiler, dynamic shapes, improved profiler
• CUDA 12.9: Latest Blackwell features and kernel performance updates
• Triton 3.4: Architecture-specific kernels and optimizations
• Nsight 2024.x: Refreshed kernel and timeline analysis capabilities
• HTA: Holistic Tracing Analysis for multi-GPU systems
• perf: Enhanced system-level sampling workflows
• Unified Profiling Harness: One command covers Nsight Systems/Compute and the PyTorch profiler

• Chapter guide: See the section below for chapter-by-chapter themes and learning goals
• docs/tooling-and-profiling.md: Nsight, HTA, perf, and harness workflows
• docs/environment.md: Blackwell stack requirements, env vars, validation, and tooling

This guide captures the context, themes, and focus areas for each chapter in the book. It mirrors the narrative that previously lived in docs/chapter-guide.md.

• The AI Systems Performance Engineer
• Benchmarking and Profiling
• Scaling Distributed Training and Inference
• Managing Resources Efficiently
• Cross-Team Collaboration
• Transparency and Reproducibility

• The CPU and GPU "Superchip"
• NVIDIA Grace CPU & Blackwell GPU
• NVIDIA GPU Tensor Cores and Transformer Engine
• Streaming Multiprocessors, Threads, and Warps
• Ultra-Scale Networking
• NVLink and NVSwitch
• Multi-GPU Programming

• Operating System Configuration
• GPU Driver and Software Stack
• NUMA Awareness and CPU Pinning
• Container Runtime Optimizations
• Kubernetes for Topology-Aware Orchestration
• Memory Isolation and Resource Management

• Overlapping Communication and Computation
• NCCL for Distributed Multi-GPU Communication
• Topology Awareness in NCCL
• Distributed Data Parallel Strategies
• NVIDIA Inference Transfer Library (NIXL)
• In-Network SHARP Aggregation

• Fast Storage and Data Locality
• NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage
• Distributed, Parallel File Systems
• Multi-Modal Data Processing with NVIDIA DALI
• Creating High-Quality LLM Datasets

• Understanding GPU Architecture
• Threads, Warps, Blocks, and Grids
• CUDA Programming Refresher
• Understanding GPU Memory Hierarchy
• Maintaining High Occupancy and GPU Utilization
• Roofline Model Analysis

• Coalesced vs. Uncoalesced Global Memory Access
• Vectorized Memory Access
• Tiling and Data Reuse Using Shared Memory
• Warp Shuffle Intrinsics
• Asynchronous Memory Prefetching

• Profiling and Diagnosing GPU Bottlenecks
• Nsight Systems and Compute Analysis
• Tuning Occupancy
• Improving Warp Execution Efficiency
• Exposing Instruction-Level Parallelism

• Multi-Level Micro-Tiling
• Kernel Fusion
• Mixed Precision and Tensor Cores
• Using CUTLASS for Optimal Performance
• Inline PTX and SASS Tuning

• Intra-Kernel Pipelining Techniques
• Warp-Specialized Producer-Consumer Model
• Persistent Kernels and Megakernels
• Thread Block Clusters and Distributed Shared Memory
• Cooperative Groups

• Using Streams to Overlap Compute with Data Transfers
• Stream-Ordered Memory Allocator
• Fine-Grained Synchronization with Events
• Zero-Overhead Launch with CUDA Graphs

• Dynamic Scheduling with Atomic Work Queues
• Batch Repeated Kernel Launches with CUDA Graphs
• Dynamic Parallelism
• Orchestrate Across Multiple GPUs with NVSHMEM

• NVTX Markers and Profiling Tools
• PyTorch Compiler (torch.compile)
• Profiling and Tuning Memory in PyTorch
• Scaling with PyTorch Distributed
• Multi-GPU Profiling with HTA

• PyTorch Compiler Deep Dive
• Writing Custom Kernels with OpenAI Triton
• PyTorch XLA Backend
• Advanced Triton Kernel Implementations

• Disaggregated Prefill and Decode Architecture
• Parallelism Strategies for MoE Models
• Speculative and Parallel Decoding Techniques
• Dynamic Routing Strategies

• Workflow for Profiling and Tuning Performance
• Dynamic Request Batching and Scheduling
• Systems-Level Optimizations
• Quantization Approaches for Real-Time Inference
• Application-Level Optimizations

• Prefill-Decode Disaggregation Benefits
• Prefill Workers Design
• Decode Workers Design
• Disaggregated Routing and Scheduling Policies
• Scalability Considerations

• Optimized Decode Kernels (FlashMLA, ThunderMLA, FlexDecoding)
• Tuning KV Cache Utilization and Management
• Heterogeneous Hardware and Parallelism Strategies
• SLO-Aware Request Management

• Adaptive Parallelism Strategies
• Dynamic Precision Changes
• Kernel Auto-Tuning
• Reinforcement Learning Agents for Runtime Tuning
• Adaptive Batching and Scheduling

• AlphaTensor AI-Discovered Algorithms
• Automated GPU Kernel Optimizations
• Self-Improving AI Agents
• Scaling Toward Multi-Million GPU Clusters

Monthly meetups with 100k+ members across 20+ cities:

• YouTube Channel
• Meetup Group

Recent sessions:

• Dynamic Adaptive RL Inference CUDA Kernel Tuning
• High Performance Agentic AI Inference Systems
• PyTorch Model Optimization

• September 15, 2025 – YouTube: Dynamic Adaptive RL inference kernel tuning deep dive; companion slides in resources/Dynamic_Adaptive_RL_Inference_CUDA_Kernel_Tuning.pdf.
• August 18, 2025 – YouTube: Multi-GPU orchestration strategies and Nsight profiling case studies.
• July 21, 2025 – YouTube: FlashMLA, ThunderMLA, and FlexDecoding kernel walkthroughs with live Nsight Compute demos.
• June 16, 2025 – Slides: High Performance Agentic AI Inference Systems covering disaggregated inference routing.
• May 19, 2025 – YouTube & PyTorch Data Loader Optimization: Torch.compile pipelines, data loader throughput tuning, and cross-architecture CUDA/ROCm kernels.
• April 21, 2025 – YouTube & AI Performance Engineering Meetup Slides: End-to-end GPU performance playbook plus the PyTorch Model Optimization workshop.

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on code, documentation, and performance improvements.

MIT License – see LICENSE for details.