When Does Heterogeneity Pay Off? Understanding GPU-WSE System Complementarity

As AI accelerator architectures become increasingly diverse, integrating different architectures into a unified system is emerging as a new heterogeneous computing paradigm. GPUs and WSEs differ substantially in compute, memory, and communication organization, creating both architectural complementarity and additional overheads, yet how to translate this heterogeneity into practical performance gains remains unclear. To address this gap, we propose a hierarchical benchmarking methodology to characterize GPU--WSE heterogeneous execution and the conditions for exploiting complementarity, together with an analytical performance model that identifies when heterogeneity becomes a bottleneck and when it yields system-level performance gains.