WarpDRF: The Unwritten Contract of GPU Warp Programming

Abstract

Warp primitives such as tensor core operations, shuffles, reductions, and barriers are critical to high-performance GPU kernels, and every major GPU language supports some set of them. The threads that participate in a primitive, and therefore synchronize, are determined dynamically by how threads diverge and reconverge, and by intra-warp scheduling such as independent thread scheduling. In practice, many high-performance kernels use these primitives and behave as expected, following an intuitive but unwritten data-race-freedom contract that has never been stated precisely or empirically tested. We present WarpDRF, the first abstract warp programming model to make this contract precise, with participation rules parameterized by reconvergence guarantees and per-primitive requirements so that instantiations match different GPU languages. We prove (formalized in Rocq) that a kernel satisfying WarpDRF executes every warp primitive with the participants the reference semantics assigns and produces the same results, so a programmer can reason in the reference semantics alone. We implement the model in MLIR with a reference interpreter and fuzz 10K conformance tests for each of three configurations across CUDA, HIP, HLSL, Metal, and SPIR-V on 16 device and backend pairs; at least one WarpDRF configuration describes each, with CUDA honoring the strictly weakest configuration. Finally, we extend Faial, a static data-race analyzer for CUDA, into the first DRF checker for an empirically validated warp model, and apply it to llama.cpp, where most kernels that use warp primitives already satisfy the contract, but three contain previously unknown data races, showing the need for tools that check it.