Mirage Persistent Kernel: A Compiler and Runtime for Mega-Kernelizing Tensor Programs

Abstract: We introduce Mirage Persistent Kernel (MPK), the first compiler and runtime system that automatically transforms multi-GPU model inference into a single high-performance megakernel. MPK introduces an SM-level graph representation that captures data dependencies at the granularity of individual streaming multiprocessors (SMs), enabling cross-operator software pipelining, fine-grained kernel overlap, and other previously infeasible GPU optimizations. The MPK compiler lowers tensor programs into highly optimized SM-level task graphs and generates optimized CUDA implementations for all tasks, while the MPK in-kernel parallel runtime executes these tasks within a single mega-kernel using decentralized scheduling across SMs. Together, these components provide end-to-end kernel fusion with minimal developer effort, while preserving the flexibility of existing programming models. Our evaluation shows that MPK significantly outperforms existing kernel-per-operator LLM serving systems by reducing end-to-end inference latency by up to 1.7x, pushing LLM inference performance close to hardware limits. MPK is publicly available at https://github.com/mirage-project/mirage.