h3-blackwell-runtime/research/vortex_exact_attention

Vortex Exact Attention

Vortex Exact Attention is a clean-sheet attention research project for MiniMax H3 on NVIDIA GB10 (sm_121a). Its claim target is the fastest reference-exact MiniMax H3 attention backend for long-context Blackwell inference. This is a research target, not an achieved performance claim.

Scope

vortex_exact must preserve the observable behavior of SageAttention 2.2.0 at commit d1a57a546c3d395b1ffcbeecc66d81db76f3b4b5. It may change scheduling, ownership, staging, and physical data movement, but not quantization, rounding, reduction, traversal, accumulation, or output-conversion semantics.

Excluded from this backend:

• sparsity;
• cache reuse;
• timestep or block skipping;
• changed Q/K/V formats or scaling;
• reordered reductions or approximate quality gates.

Such work belongs in a future vortex_fast backend with a separate contract.

Status

• Phase 0: imported and verified retained Sage2 exactness specification.
• Phase 1: design decision complete; VEA-B is the recommended prototype.
• Kernel implementation: not started.
• Production dispatch: unchanged; no vortex_exact route exists.

Authoritative Baseline

Item	Value
Device	NVIDIA GB10, SM121
Workload	1344x768, 124 frames, 37,810 tokens, 56 heads, D=128
Resident sampling median	255.447 s
Sage2 share	62.36%, approximately 159.3 s
Uninstrumented mainloop	237.089 ms
NCU grid / block	(296,56,1) / (32,4,1)
KV traversal	591 increasing 64-row tiles, two explicit stages
Registers / dynamic shared memory	255/thread / 32 KiB
Achieved occupancy	16.65-16.83%
No-eligible scheduler cycles	63.53%
L2 hit / memory throughput	98.85% / approximately 31.74%

The target is dependency latency and live-state ownership. Launch overhead, off-chip bandwidth, ragged tails, and ordinary shared-memory padding are closed as primary explanations.

Gates

The first implementation may begin only after the Phase 1 design commit. No candidate can advance unless its model plausibly reduces simultaneous live state, avoids material score/probability tensors and catastrophic spilling, preserves the exact reduction sequence, and has a credible path below 220 ms. A model below 190 ms is preferred.

Executable advancement later requires byte-exact short shapes, canonical attention, blocks 0/24/49, two-step latents, and 12-step latents, plus sanitizer, p95, block-level, and resident-service gates.

Layout

• NUMERICAL_CONTRACT.md: imported exact Sage2 semantics and proof limits.
• DESIGN.md: state-ownership architectures and selected prototype.
• PERFORMANCE_MODEL.md: resource and latency model.
• HARDWARE_CAPABILITIES.md: target-specific hardware facts and unknowns.
• EXPERIMENT_LOG.md: append-only research decisions.
• benchmarks/: machine-readable models and fixture manifests.
• kernels/: future isolated implementation; currently contains no kernel.
• tests/: future parity and sanitizer harnesses.
• tools/: project-local verification/modeling utilities.

Phase 1 selects a Q128, ten-warp paired-owner pipeline in which four QK/softmax warps own RS/RS_f8/m/d, four distinct PV warps own RO, and two producer warps own K/V staging. This differs structurally from P3 because complete state is transferred or partitioned rather than retained in every compute warp. Its 180-207 ms mainloop range is a heuristic screening model, not a measured result; physical register allocation and overlap remain unverified.

Provenance

The reference is the public SageAttention repository at the pinned commit above. No upstream source is copied into this project. Before implementation, every borrowed algorithmic or source component must record its origin and license. P1/P2 local code may be reused only as provenance-preserving components inside an owned pipeline. See NUMERICAL_CONTRACT.md and EXPERIMENT_LOG.md.