Stop hand-porting kernels: migrate PyTorch and Triton kernels to AWS Trainium with an AWS Transform custom agent

This article introduces a custom AWS Transform agent that automates the migration of PyTorch and Triton kernels to AWS Trainium's Neuron Kernel Interface (NKI), eliminating manual kernel porting as a migration bottleneck.

• Agent generates NKI kernels from PyTorch modules or Triton kernels, then compiles and verifies on real Trainium hardware
• Achieves 83% compilation success rate and 88% numerical accuracy on weight-free tasks through compile-verify-fix feedback loops
• Uses single MCP server contract deployable across AWS Transform console, CLI, Claude Code, and other MCP-aware agents
• Includes real Trainium device in reward path to eliminate simulator-to-hardware drift and ensure production-ready kernels
• Pluggable model routing: Claude Opus for novel ops, fine-tuned specialist for in-distribution shapes, with customer override options
• Demonstrates 1.4× to 15.3× speedup of hand-written NKI kernels versus torch.compile baseline on same hardware
• Integrates as post-migration step in larger AWS Transform workflows for GPU-to-Trainium infrastructure migrations

The agent proves that tight feedback loops with ground-truth hardware verification are more impactful than model choice alone for code generation tasks.