Ranggi Hwang
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology · Computer Science
About the Lab
Professor Ranggi Hwang's research lab focuses on system-level optimization for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads, with a strong emphasis on efficient hardware-software co-design for deep learning accelerators. The lab explores performance bottlenecks in emerging AI workloads such as graph neural networks, large language models, and differentially private training, targeting efficient execution on specialized accelerators like NPUs and GPUs. Key research directions include novel algorithmic accelerations (e.g., GEMM optimizations, speculative decoding), memory and bandwidth efficiency, and privacy-preserving AI systems. The lab also evaluates next-generation AI hardware platforms, such as Intel Gaudi, to enable competitive performance and programmability for production-scale AI workloads.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Selected Papers
9Graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) have emerged as a key technology in various application domains where the input data is relational. A unique property of GCNs is that its two primary execution stages, aggregation and combination, exhibit drastically different dataflows. Consequently, prior GCN accelerators tackle this research space by casting the aggregation and combination stages as a series of sparse-dense matrix multiplication. However, prior work frequently suffers from inefficien
Differential privacy (DP) is widely being employed in the industry as a practical standard for privacy protection. While private training of computer vision or natural language processing applications has been studied extensively, the computational challenges of training of recommender systems (RecSys) with DP have not been explored. In this work, we first present our detailed characterization of private RecSys training using DP-SGD, root-causing its several performance bottlenecks. Specifically
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of Intel Gaudi NPUs as an alternative to NVIDIA GPUs, which is currently the de facto standard in AI system design. First, we create a suite of microbenchmarks to compare Intel Gaudi-2 with NVIDIA A100, showing that Gaudi-2 achieves competitive performance not only in primitive AI compute, memory, and communication operations but also in executing several important AI workloads end-to-end. We then assess Gaudi NPU's programmability by discussing sev
The emergence of reasoning-based LLMs leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) inference introduces new serving challenges, as their extended reasoning phases delay user-visible output and inflate Time-To-First-Token (TTFT). Existing LLM serving frameworks fail to distinguish between reasoning and answering phases, leading to performance degradation under GPU memory constraints. We present PASCAL, a phase-aware scheduling algorithm that prioritizes reasoning to reduce TTFT while using controlled preemp
The recent advancement of the natural language processing (NLP) models is the result of the ever-increasing model size and datasets. Most of these modern NLP models adopt the Transformer based model architecture, whose main bottleneck is exhibited in the self-attention mechanism. As the computation required for self-attention increases rapidly as the model size gets larger, self-attentions have been the main challenge for deploying NLP models. Consequently, there are several prior works which so
The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate the rising computational costs of large language models (LLMs) by selectively activating parameters. However, its high memory requirements and sub-optimal parameter efficiency pose significant challenges for efficient deployment. Although CPU-offloaded MoE inference systems have been proposed in the literature, they offer limited efficiency, particularly for large batch sizes. In this work, we propose SpecM
The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate the rising computational costs of large language models (LLMs) by selectively activating parameters. However, its high memory requirements and sub-optimal parameter efficiency pose significant challenges for efficient deployment. Although CPU-offloaded MoE inference systems have been proposed in the literature, they offer limited efficiency, particularly for large batch sizes. In this work, we propose SpecM
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across modalities, such as image, video, and audio understanding, by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a backbone. However, a critical challenge in MLLM inference is the large memory capacity required for the key–value (KV) cache, particularly when processing high-resolution images. This pressure often forces heterogeneous CPU–GPU systems to offload the KV cache to CPU memory, introducing substantial transfer
Research Areas
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