Mani Pal

Engineer-researcher

Mani Pal

LLM systems, CUDA kernels, inference optimization, compression, interpretability, and distributed AI infrastructure.

LLM systems · CUDA kernels · Inference

LLM inference, made measurably faster.

I work where the model meets the metal: attention kernels, speculative decoding, KV-cache behavior, compression, and the serving stack around them. Every claim on this site links to code, profiling traces, and benchmarks.

Attention throughput
0.0×

Attention throughput

vs PyTorch SDPA, A100

Decoding speedup
0.0×

Decoding speedup

Identical output dist.

Memory reduction
0%

Memory reduction

Tensor-network MPO

LLM from scratch
0M

LLM from scratch

Hybrid Mamba-2 + attn

fig. 01 — tiled causal attention sweep

live

Br=64 · Bc=64 · SRAM-resident · HBM traffic O(N²) → O(N)read the kernel write-up →

45-second signals

Six things worth your scroll

Timeline

Milestones

Research, systems, benchmarks, and open-source across the lab record.

2023

System

Production RAG and model adaptation

Delivered legal-tech RAG and QLoRA fine-tuning work before focusing fully on LLM systems.

2024

System

Project Chimera begins

Designed a 700M hybrid Mamba-2 and Transformer LLM, tokenizer, training schedule, and evaluation path.

System

VAANI offline assistant

Built a Hindi-first offline voice stack with wake word, ASR, local LLM, and TTS under 800ms.

2025

Benchmark

Speculative decoding reaches 2.4x

Implemented draft-verifier inference with adaptive lookahead and distribution-preserving sampling.

Open Source

vLLM disaggregated prefill patch

Fixed request-ID mismatch across prefill and decode nodes causing KV cache transfer hangs.

Benchmark

Sparse MoE scaling run

Implemented top-k routing, z-loss balancing, entropy logging, and matched-FLOP dense baselines.

2026

Research

Grokking Beyond Addition published

Circuit-level study across abelian and non-abelian algebraic operations published on Zenodo.

Benchmark

FlashAttention-2 kernel profiled

CUDA C++ tiled attention kernel reached 2.1x throughput over PyTorch SDPA at sequence length 4096.

Research

CompactifAI extension completed

Extended tensor-network compression with adaptive bond-dimension scheduling and model healing.

Benchmarks

Measured systems signals

Speculative decoding2.4x
FlashAttention-2 kernel2.1x
Sparse MoE2.3x
API p95 reduction35%
MPO memory reduction93%

Systems map

Training, compression, kernels, serving, evaluation

View case studies

Current investigations

Internal notebook surface

Open notebook
Failed Experimentsfailed

Non-Abelian Grokking Capacity Ceiling

Can the same one-layer transformer that groks abelian operations grok non-abelian groups under longer training?

Compression Studiesreproduced

Uniform MPO Compression Collapse

Does a single global bond dimension preserve quality across all transformer layers?

Benchmark Logsarchived

Fixed-Gamma Speculative Decoding

Is a fixed draft lookahead window enough for CPU speculative decoding?

Scaling Studiesreproduced

Sparse MoE Router Entropy

Can routing entropy predict expert collapse before validation loss exposes it?

Contract engagements

Serving models in production and the GPU bill hurts?

Fixed-scope inference optimization sprints with a benchmark target agreed up front — and a guarantee behind it.

See engagements