Compiler-Friendly State Space Duality Enables Portable, Efficient Mamba-2 Inference Without Custom Kernels
Researchers demonstrated that Mamba-2's state space duality recurrence can be implemented using standard JAX primitives without custom CUDA/Triton kernels, enabling portable inference across different accelerator backends. The approach achieves near-optimal performance on Google Cloud TPU v6e (64% hardware bandwidth utilization for cached decode) and maintains sequence-length independence on NVIDIA L40S GPUs. This work addresses a key limitation of high-throughput Mamba-2 inference by decoupling performance from backend-specific optimizations while matching reference implementations in validation metrics.
Researchers presented a compiler-first approach to Mamba-2 inference that leverages the structural properties of state space duality (SSD) recurrence—specifically diagonal per-head dynamics, fixed-size chunking, einsum-dominated operations, and static control flow—to enable implementation in standard JAX without custom kernels. On a single Google Cloud TPU v6e, the implementation achieves batch-1 prefill performance of approximately 140 TFLOPS (15% model FLOP utilization, the theoretical ceiling for this regime) and cached decode reaching 64% hardware bandwidth utilization. Across five Mamba-2 checkpoints ranging from 130M to 2.7B parameters, cached decode is 27x–36x faster than full-prefix recomputation at 4096-token context length. The same unmodified source code runs on NVIDIA L40S GPUs while maintaining sequence-length independence across all model scales. Validation on WikiText-103 matches the reference Triton-based mamba_ssm v2.2.2 implementation within ±0.0005 perplexity points, with hidden states agreeing to float32 rounding tolerance.
What's missing
The paper does not discuss potential limitations of the JAX-based approach compared to hand-optimized CUDA kernels for specific hardware configurations, nor does it address memory consumption or latency characteristics for very large batch sizes or longer sequences beyond the tested 4096-token context.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.AICenter
Compiler-First State Space Duality and Portable $O(1)$ Autoregressive Caching for Inference
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