Using XLA tooling

The XLA development workflow is usually centered around HLO IR, which represents isolated functional computation given to the compiler. XLA comes with multiple command line tools (described below) which consume HLO and either run it, or provide an intermediate compilation stage. Using such tools is invaluable for a fast compile->modify->run iteration cycle, as HLO is both visualizable and hackable, and iteratively changing and running it is often the fastest way to understand and to fix an XLA performance or behavior.

The easiest way to obtain the HLO for a program being compiled with XLA is usually to use the XLA_FLAGS environment variable:

XLA_FLAGS=--xla_dump_to=/tmp/myfolder ./myprogram-entry-point

which stores all before-optimization HLO files in the folder specified, along with many other useful artifacts.

Running HLO snippets: run_hlo_module

The tool run_hlo_module operates on pre-optimization HLO, and by default bundles compilation, running and comparison with the reference interpreter implementation. For example, the usual invocation to run an input file computation.hlo on an NVIDIA GPU and to check it for correctness is:

run_hlo_module --platform=CUDA --reference_platform=Interpreter computation.hlo

As with all the tools, --help can be used to obtain the full list of options.

Running HLO snippets with SPMD support: multihost_hlo_runner

Multihost HLO runner is a very similar tool, with the caveat that it supports SPMD, including cross host communication. A typical invocation looks like:

hlo_runner_main  --device_type=gpu --use_spmd_partitioning=true --num_partitions=4 --num_replicas=1 --hlo_file=computation.hlo

Running passes/stages of HLO compilation: hlo-opt

When debugging or understanding the workings of the compiler, it is often useful to get the expansion for a particular hardware at a particular point in the pipeline (be it HLO, optimized HLO, TritonIR or LLVM), for a given (Stable) HLO input.

hlo-opt supports multiple output stages: be it PTX, HLO after optimizations, LLVM IR before optimizations, or TritonIR. The exact set of stages supported depends on the platform (as e.g. PTX is NVIDIA-specific), and can be seen using the --list-stages command:

$ hlo-opt --platform=CUDA --list-stages
hlo
llvm
ptx

After selecting a stage, the user can write the result of the conversion for a given platform to a given stream:

$ hlo-opt myinput.hlo --platform=CUDA --stage=llvm

which would print the dump to stdout (or to a given file if -o was specified).

Deviceless Usage

Access to a GPU is not needed for most of the compilation, and by specifying a GPU spec on the command line we can get e.g. PTX output without access to an accelerator:

$ hlo-opt  --platform=CUDA --stage=llvm  --xla_gpu_target_config_filename=(pwd)/tools/data/gpu_specs/a100_80.txtpb input.hlo

Specs for popular GPUs are shipped with the compiler, and the provided file is string serialization of device_description.proto:

gpu_device_info {
  cuda_compute_capability {
    major: 8
    minor: 0
  }
  threads_per_block_limit: 1024
  threads_per_warp: 32
  shared_memory_per_block: 127152
  shared_memory_per_core: 65536
  threads_per_core_limit: 2048
  core_count: 6192
  fpus_per_core: 64
  block_dim_limit_x: 2147483647
  block_dim_limit_y: 65535
  block_dim_limit_z: 65535
  memory_bandwidth: 2039000000000
  l2_cache_size: 4194304
  clock_rate_ghz: 1.1105
  device_memory_size: 79050250240
}
platform_name: "CUDA"

Deviceless compilation might run into issues if autotuning is required. Luckily, we can also provide those on the command line:

hlo-opt  --platform=CUDA --stage=llvm  --xla_gpu_target_config_filename=gpu_specs/a100_80.txtpb --xla_gpu_load_autotune_results_from=results.textpb input.hlo

The autotune file is text serialization of autotune_results.proto, with example looking like:

version: 2
results {
  device: "sm_8.0 with 42331013120B RAM, 108 cores, 1410000KHz clock, 1215000KHz mem clock, 41943040B L2$"
  hlo: "{\n  tmp_0 = f16[1,16,17,3]{3,2,1,0} parameter(0)\n  tmp_1 = f16[16,51]{1,0} bitcast(f16[1,16,17,3]{3,2,1,0} tmp_0)\n  tmp_2 = s8[16,17,3]{2,1,0} parameter(1)\n  tmp_3 = s8[51,16]{0,1} bitcast(s8[16,17,3]{2,1,0} tmp_2)\n  tmp_4 = f16[51,16]{0,1} convert(s8[51,16]{0,1} tmp_3)\n  tmp_5 = f16[16,16]{1,0} dot(f16[16,51]{1,0} tmp_1, f16[51,16]{0,1} tmp_4), lhs_contracting_dims={1}, rhs_contracting_dims={0}\n  ROOT tmp_6 = f16[1,16,16]{2,1,0} bitcast(f16[16,16]{1,0} tmp_5)\n}"
  result {
    run_time {
      nanos: 31744
    }
    triton {
      block_m: 32
      block_n: 32
      block_k: 32
      split_k: 1
      num_stages: 1
      num_warps: 4
    }
  }
}

The autotuning database can be serialized using XLA_FLAGS=--xla_gpu_dump_autotune_results_t=<myfile.pbtxt>

Running a Single Compiler Pass

The flags from XLA_FLAGS are also supported, so the tool can be used to test running a single pass:

hlo-opt --platform=CUDA --stage=hlo --xla-hlo-enable-passes-only=algebraic_simplifer input.hlo