CascadeInfer: Length-Aware Scheduling of LLM Serving with Low Latency and Load Balancing

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yuan, Yitao, Zhao, Chenqi, Zhao, Bohan, Cao, Zane, He, Yongchao, Wu, Wenfei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Yuan, Yitao
Zhao, Chenqi
Zhao, Bohan
Cao, Zane
He, Yongchao
Wu, Wenfei
author_facet Yuan, Yitao
Zhao, Chenqi
Zhao, Bohan
Cao, Zane
He, Yongchao
Wu, Wenfei
contents Efficiently harnessing GPU compute is critical to improving user experience and reducing operational costs in large language model (LLM) services. However, current inference engine schedulers overlook the attention backend's sensitivity to request-length heterogeneity within a batch. As state-of-the-art models now support context windows exceeding 128K tokens, this once-tolerable inefficiency has escalated into a primary system bottleneck, causing severe performance degradation through GPU underutilization and increased latency. We present CascadeInfer, a runtime system that dynamically reschedules requests across multiple instances serving the same LLM to mitigate per-instance length heterogeneity. CascadeInfer partitions these instances into length-specialized groups, each handling requests within a designated length range, naturally forming a pipeline as requests flow through them. CascadeInfer devises a dynamic programming algorithm to efficiently find the stage partition with the best QoE, employs runtime range refinement together with decentralized load (re)balance both across and within groups, achieving a balanced and efficient multi-instance service. Our evaluation shows that, under the same configuration, CascadeInfer reduces end-to-end latency by up to 67% and tail latency by up to 69%, while improving overall system throughput by up to 2.89 times compared to the state-of-the-art multi-instance scheduling systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_19179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CascadeInfer: Length-Aware Scheduling of LLM Serving with Low Latency and Load Balancing
Yuan, Yitao
Zhao, Chenqi
Zhao, Bohan
Cao, Zane
He, Yongchao
Wu, Wenfei
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Efficiently harnessing GPU compute is critical to improving user experience and reducing operational costs in large language model (LLM) services. However, current inference engine schedulers overlook the attention backend's sensitivity to request-length heterogeneity within a batch. As state-of-the-art models now support context windows exceeding 128K tokens, this once-tolerable inefficiency has escalated into a primary system bottleneck, causing severe performance degradation through GPU underutilization and increased latency. We present CascadeInfer, a runtime system that dynamically reschedules requests across multiple instances serving the same LLM to mitigate per-instance length heterogeneity. CascadeInfer partitions these instances into length-specialized groups, each handling requests within a designated length range, naturally forming a pipeline as requests flow through them. CascadeInfer devises a dynamic programming algorithm to efficiently find the stage partition with the best QoE, employs runtime range refinement together with decentralized load (re)balance both across and within groups, achieving a balanced and efficient multi-instance service. Our evaluation shows that, under the same configuration, CascadeInfer reduces end-to-end latency by up to 67% and tail latency by up to 69%, while improving overall system throughput by up to 2.89 times compared to the state-of-the-art multi-instance scheduling systems.
title CascadeInfer: Length-Aware Scheduling of LLM Serving with Low Latency and Load Balancing
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19179