Cohere open-sources megakernel serving engine, up to 1.58x faster than vLLM
cohere · x · 2026-09-09
Cohere has released the first fully-fledged LLM serving system built around a decode megakernel, fully open-source on GitHub.
- Approach: a single persistent CUDA kernel executes the entire decode forward pass, eliminating per-op launch overhead and full-grid barriers to maximize GPU utilization
- Results: on one H100 (BF16), 1.58x faster decode than vLLM at batch size 1 and 1.25x–1.41x end-to-end serving at BS=8, reaching 62% of H100 speed-of-light
- Scope: early research release with an OpenAI-compatible API, tested only on single-H100 (sm90a), CUDA 13+, batch sizes up to 8, built for North Mini Code
Related event: Cohere open-sources Megakernel inference engine, 1.58x faster than vLLM(2 posts)→
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