Accelerating LLM Inference Throughput via Asynchronous KV Cache Prefetching

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Dong, Yanhao, Miao, Yubo, Li, Weinan, Zheng, Xiao, Wang, Chao, Wu, Jiesheng, Lyu, Feng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Dong, Yanhao
Miao, Yubo
Li, Weinan
Zheng, Xiao
Wang, Chao
Wu, Jiesheng
Lyu, Feng
author_facet Dong, Yanhao
Miao, Yubo
Li, Weinan
Zheng, Xiao
Wang, Chao
Wu, Jiesheng
Lyu, Feng
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit pronounced memory-bound characteristics during inference due to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we propose an L2 Cache-oriented asynchronous KV Cache prefetching method to break through the memory bandwidth bottleneck in LLM inference through computation-load overlap. By strategically scheduling idle memory bandwidth during active computation windows, our method proactively prefetches required KV Cache into GPU L2 cache, enabling high-speed L2 cache hits for subsequent accesses and effectively hiding HBM access latency within computational cycles. Extensive experiments on NVIDIA H20 GPUs demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 2.15x improvement in attention kernel efficiency and up to 1.97x end-to-end throughput enhancement, surpassing state-of-the-art baseline FlashAttention-3. Notably, our solution maintains orthogonality to existing optimization techniques and can be integrated with current inference frameworks, providing a scalable latency-hiding solution for next-generation LLM inference engines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06319
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating LLM Inference Throughput via Asynchronous KV Cache Prefetching
Dong, Yanhao
Miao, Yubo
Li, Weinan
Zheng, Xiao
Wang, Chao
Wu, Jiesheng
Lyu, Feng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit pronounced memory-bound characteristics during inference due to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we propose an L2 Cache-oriented asynchronous KV Cache prefetching method to break through the memory bandwidth bottleneck in LLM inference through computation-load overlap. By strategically scheduling idle memory bandwidth during active computation windows, our method proactively prefetches required KV Cache into GPU L2 cache, enabling high-speed L2 cache hits for subsequent accesses and effectively hiding HBM access latency within computational cycles. Extensive experiments on NVIDIA H20 GPUs demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 2.15x improvement in attention kernel efficiency and up to 1.97x end-to-end throughput enhancement, surpassing state-of-the-art baseline FlashAttention-3. Notably, our solution maintains orthogonality to existing optimization techniques and can be integrated with current inference frameworks, providing a scalable latency-hiding solution for next-generation LLM inference engines.
title Accelerating LLM Inference Throughput via Asynchronous KV Cache Prefetching
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06319