Stencil Computation at the Intersection of AI and HPC

Tensor compilers such as TinyTC and OpenAI Triton were originally developed for AI workloads, but the same tiling and memory abstractions can be applied to implement efficient high-order stencils for scientific and industrial applications. We demonstrate this for an 8th-order, 25-point acoustic stencil with boundary conditions over an a demanding-sized grid, targeting GPGPUs, where we compare the hardware-specialized TinyTC implementation with a portable PyTorch/Triton implementation. The target platforms for evaluation include Intel B70, B580, GPU MAX 1550, NVIDIA A100/RTX6000 Blackwell/H100, and AMD MI325x. For instance, on Battlemage B580 TinyTC reaches 15.6 Gpts/s versus 13.5 Gpts/s for PT/Triton under random initialization, while zero-initialized runs reach up to 35.8 Gpts/s due to hardware memory compression. Using roofline and memory-hierarchy profiling, we show that -as expected- performance is predominantly bandwidth-limited and that compiler-managed L1/LSC caching can effectively replace programmer-managed shared-memory staging for this stencil class. Overall, the results position TinyTC as the performance-oriented path on Intel hardware and PyTorch/Triton as a strong portability/productivity baseline for cross-vendor HPC stencil development.