Regulating Branch Parallelism in LLM Serving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gandhi, Swapnil, Hari, Siva, Dally, William J., Kozyrakis, Christos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Gandhi, Swapnil
Hari, Siva
Dally, William J.
Kozyrakis, Christos
author_facet Gandhi, Swapnil
Hari, Siva
Dally, William J.
Kozyrakis, Christos
contents Recent methods expose intra-request parallelism in LLM outputs, allowing independent branches to decode concurrently. Existing serving systems execute these branches eagerly or under fixed caps. We show that both are brittle: eager admission inflates the shared decode step, degrading co-batched requests in serial stages, while conservative fixed caps forgo the throughput that motivated exposing branches in the first place. We call the excess step latency caused by admitted branches the branch externality and show that the safe width depends on batch composition, context lengths, and accumulated slack, all of which change continuously over a workload trace. We introduce TAPER, a per-step admission controller that treats extra branches as opportunistic work, admitted only when the predicted branch externality fits within the batch's current slack budget. Per-step regulation is practical because branch-level scheduling decouples compute from memory: branches share the request's prefix KV, so expanding or contracting width requires no memory reclamation. On Qwen3-32B, TAPER improves goodput by $1.77\times$ over IRP-Off and by $1.48\times$ over IRP-Eager, while maintaining over $95\%$ SLO attainment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06914
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Regulating Branch Parallelism in LLM Serving
Gandhi, Swapnil
Hari, Siva
Dally, William J.
Kozyrakis, Christos
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recent methods expose intra-request parallelism in LLM outputs, allowing independent branches to decode concurrently. Existing serving systems execute these branches eagerly or under fixed caps. We show that both are brittle: eager admission inflates the shared decode step, degrading co-batched requests in serial stages, while conservative fixed caps forgo the throughput that motivated exposing branches in the first place. We call the excess step latency caused by admitted branches the branch externality and show that the safe width depends on batch composition, context lengths, and accumulated slack, all of which change continuously over a workload trace. We introduce TAPER, a per-step admission controller that treats extra branches as opportunistic work, admitted only when the predicted branch externality fits within the batch's current slack budget. Per-step regulation is practical because branch-level scheduling decouples compute from memory: branches share the request's prefix KV, so expanding or contracting width requires no memory reclamation. On Qwen3-32B, TAPER improves goodput by $1.77\times$ over IRP-Off and by $1.48\times$ over IRP-Eager, while maintaining over $95\%$ SLO attainment.
title Regulating Branch Parallelism in LLM Serving
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06914