FastKernels: Benchmarking GPU Kernel Generation in Production

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23215v1
• Date: Fri, 22 May 2026 04:19:04 GMT
• Title: FastKernels: Benchmarking GPU Kernel Generation in Production
• Abstract summary: LLM-based agents for GPU kernel generation are advancing rapidly.<n>Yet their progress is constrained by the benchmarks they optimize against.<n>Fast Kernels is a production-grade inference framework that runs at parity with hardened systems.
• Score: 15.284289018908781
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: LLM-based agents for GPU kernel generation are advancing rapidly, yet their progress is fundamentally constrained by the benchmarks they optimize against. Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with production inference frameworks: they evaluate kernels on a single GPU with synthetic inputs, ignore the surrounding compilation stack, and reward replicating known optimizations rather than discovering new ones. The resulting reward signals are misleading: agents learn to generate kernels that score well in sandboxes but introduce interface incompatibilities, compilation-stack conflicts, and silent correctness degradation when integrated into real systems. We introduce FastKernels, a kernel benchmark built around a minimal set of 46 representative architectures spanning 8 categories, whose kernels collectively subsume those of 96.2% (409/425) of HuggingFace Transformers architectures. FastKernels doubles as a minimalistic, production-grade inference framework that runs at parity with hardened systems such as vLLM and SGLang on mainstream LLM serving and substantially exceeds upstream references on under-served architectures; each task's interface mirrors the corresponding module in the state-of-the-art library for its architecture family, enabling direct deployment of optimized kernels into production codebases. Evaluating state-of-the-art kernel agents on FastKernels, we find that even the strongest agent achieves only 0.94$\times$ aggregate speedup over production baselines, with weaker agents at $0.78\times$ and $0.53\times$ -- confirming that benchmark-production misalignment is a critical bottleneck for the field. We release FastKernels as a stepping stone toward kernel agents whose benchmark gains translate directly into production throughput improvements. Code is available at https://github.com/Snowflake-AI-Research/fastkernels

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