Foundry: Template-Based CUDA Graph Context Materialization for Fast LLM Serving Cold Start

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Xueshen, Wu, Yongji, Yao, Yuncheng, Zhuo, Danyang, Stoica, Ion, Mao, Z. Morley
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Liu, Xueshen
Wu, Yongji
Yao, Yuncheng
Zhuo, Danyang
Stoica, Ion
Mao, Z. Morley
author_facet Liu, Xueshen
Wu, Yongji
Yao, Yuncheng
Zhuo, Danyang
Stoica, Ion
Mao, Z. Morley
contents Modern LLM service providers increasingly rely on autoscaling and parallelism reconfiguration to respond to rapidly changing workloads, but cold-start latency remains a major bottleneck. While recent systems have reduced model weight loading to seconds, CUDA graph capture still takes tens of seconds to minutes and often dominates startup. Unfortunately, CUDA graphs cannot be naively serialized: beyond graph topology, they are tightly coupled to execution context, including device addresses embedded in kernel arguments and kernel code lazily loaded during warmup. Existing approaches either rely on brittle kernel-specific patching or heavyweight process-level checkpoint/restore that are inflexible to dynamic parallelism switching. We present Foundry, a template-based CUDA graph context materialization system that persists both graph topology and execution context during an offline processing stage, and reconstructs executable graphs online with negligible overhead. Foundry enforces deterministic memory layouts, automatically extracts and reloads kernel binaries required by captured graphs, and reduces online reconstruction costs through topology-based templating. For distributed serving, Foundry further enables a single-GPU offline capture to generate templates for multi-GPU deployments by patching only rank-dependent communication state. Across dense and MoE models up to 235B parameters, Foundry reduces cold-start latency by up to 99%, cutting the initialization time of Qwen3-235B-A22B from 10 minutes to 3.9 seconds while preserving the throughput gains of CUDA graphs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06664
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Foundry: Template-Based CUDA Graph Context Materialization for Fast LLM Serving Cold Start
Liu, Xueshen
Wu, Yongji
Yao, Yuncheng
Zhuo, Danyang
Stoica, Ion
Mao, Z. Morley
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Modern LLM service providers increasingly rely on autoscaling and parallelism reconfiguration to respond to rapidly changing workloads, but cold-start latency remains a major bottleneck. While recent systems have reduced model weight loading to seconds, CUDA graph capture still takes tens of seconds to minutes and often dominates startup. Unfortunately, CUDA graphs cannot be naively serialized: beyond graph topology, they are tightly coupled to execution context, including device addresses embedded in kernel arguments and kernel code lazily loaded during warmup. Existing approaches either rely on brittle kernel-specific patching or heavyweight process-level checkpoint/restore that are inflexible to dynamic parallelism switching. We present Foundry, a template-based CUDA graph context materialization system that persists both graph topology and execution context during an offline processing stage, and reconstructs executable graphs online with negligible overhead. Foundry enforces deterministic memory layouts, automatically extracts and reloads kernel binaries required by captured graphs, and reduces online reconstruction costs through topology-based templating. For distributed serving, Foundry further enables a single-GPU offline capture to generate templates for multi-GPU deployments by patching only rank-dependent communication state. Across dense and MoE models up to 235B parameters, Foundry reduces cold-start latency by up to 99%, cutting the initialization time of Qwen3-235B-A22B from 10 minutes to 3.9 seconds while preserving the throughput gains of CUDA graphs.
title Foundry: Template-Based CUDA Graph Context Materialization for Fast LLM Serving Cold Start
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06664