Agentic AI for Heterogeneous System Design Across Chip, Scale-Up, and Scale-Out Domains

By Murali Emani ¹, Kashyap R Manjusha ^2
1 Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA
² University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

Abstract

The design space of modern AI/HPC systems has expanded rapidly across compute architectures, including GPUs, dataflow processors, and RISC-V accelerators; memory tech- nologies, including HBM, GDDR, and SRAM; and interconnects such as NVLink, UALink, Infinity Fabric, InfiniBand, Slingshot, and Ultra Ethernet. No single architecture is optimal across LLM training, LLM serving, and AI-coupled HPC workloads, while the resulting combinatorial design space is too large for manual exploration. We present ArchAgent, a hierarchical multi- agent framework in which an LLM-based planner decomposes system design into chip, scale-up, and scale-out subproblems, each handled by specialist agents. A deterministic analytical evaluator closes the loop, ensuring that all performance estimates are derived from analytical models rather than generated by the LLM. On a mixed AI+HPC workload under a 1 MW power budget, ArchAgent discovers heterogeneous designs that achieve a 1.93x weighted geometric mean speedup over a homogeneous GPU baseline, while requiring only 18 evaluations compared with 100 evaluations for hill climbing, which achieves 1.65x speedup.

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