SynPerf: A Hybrid Analytical-ML Framework for GPU Performance Prediction

Abstract: The rapid expansion of Transformer-based LLMs has dramatically increased the need for high-performance GPUs. As a result, there is growing demand for fast, accurate, and widely generalizable GPU performance models to support next-generation hardware selection and system-level exploration. However, current data-driven methods are limited, exhibiting poor generalization across hardware and inadequate modeling of complex production-level kernels common in modern inference stacks. To address these issues, we present SyncPerf, a unified GPU modeling framework. This approach first employs an analytical model to quantify a given kernel's demands on the GPU's heterogeneous instruction pipelines. These analytical features are then fed into a ML model to capture complex cross-pipeline interactions and resource dependencies, enabling high-fidelity performance prediction. Our evaluation across 11 GPU types from four generations of major architectures on two widely-used serving systems demonstrates that SyncPerf delivers high fidelity and strong generalizability. It achieves accurate predictions, with only 6.1% average error at the kernel level and 8.5% for end-to-end inference -- reducing the error of state-of-the-art methods by 6.7x and 4.4x, respectively. We also demonstrate SynPerf's value "beyond simulation" by utilizing its performance ceiling to diagnose implementation shortcomings and guide the optimization of a production fused MoE Triton kernel, achieving up to 1.7x speedup.