ViBE: Co-Optimizing Workload Skew and Hardware Variability for MoE Serving

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Go, Seokjin, Scrbak, Marko, Wu, Ephrem, Manne, Srilatha, Mahajan, Divya
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Go, Seokjin
Scrbak, Marko
Wu, Ephrem
Manne, Srilatha
Mahajan, Divya
author_facet Go, Seokjin
Scrbak, Marko
Wu, Ephrem
Manne, Srilatha
Mahajan, Divya
contents In distributed Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference, input-dependent token routing interacts with GPU performance variability to create persistent stragglers under synchronized execution, where the slowest GPU determines layer latency. This performance variability is inherent to modern accelerators: manufacturing variation, power limits, and thermal conditions introduce measurable execution-time differences across nominally identical GPUs. The core challenge is that MoE execution-time imbalance arises from the interaction of workload skew and hardware asymmetry. Token routing produces uneven and layer-varying expert loads, while GPU throughput depends on device-specific operating characteristics and workload intensity. Prior work mitigates routing skew but assumes homogeneous hardware, optimizing token balance rather than execution latency. As a result, even balanced token assignments can leave hardware-induced stragglers unaddressed. Thus, we propose Variability-Informed Binning of Experts (ViBE), a hardware-aware expert placement framework that minimizes execution-time imbalance across GPUs. ViBE combines per-GPU performance modeling with expert activation profiling to assign high-load experts to faster devices and low-load experts to slower ones, reducing layer-level stragglers without modifying model semantics or hardware. Because both workload characteristics and effective GPU throughput can shift across serving conditions, ViBE supports lightweight recalibration under workload/performance drift to refresh its routing and performance estimates when needed. Results show that ViBE consistently reduces execution-time imbalance and improves SLO attainment by 14%, while lowering P90 TTFT by up to 45%. We further show that the impact of hardware variability increases at scale, making variability-aware placement important for efficient, high-utilization LLM serving.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViBE: Co-Optimizing Workload Skew and Hardware Variability for MoE Serving
Go, Seokjin
Scrbak, Marko
Wu, Ephrem
Manne, Srilatha
Mahajan, Divya
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
In distributed Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference, input-dependent token routing interacts with GPU performance variability to create persistent stragglers under synchronized execution, where the slowest GPU determines layer latency. This performance variability is inherent to modern accelerators: manufacturing variation, power limits, and thermal conditions introduce measurable execution-time differences across nominally identical GPUs. The core challenge is that MoE execution-time imbalance arises from the interaction of workload skew and hardware asymmetry. Token routing produces uneven and layer-varying expert loads, while GPU throughput depends on device-specific operating characteristics and workload intensity. Prior work mitigates routing skew but assumes homogeneous hardware, optimizing token balance rather than execution latency. As a result, even balanced token assignments can leave hardware-induced stragglers unaddressed. Thus, we propose Variability-Informed Binning of Experts (ViBE), a hardware-aware expert placement framework that minimizes execution-time imbalance across GPUs. ViBE combines per-GPU performance modeling with expert activation profiling to assign high-load experts to faster devices and low-load experts to slower ones, reducing layer-level stragglers without modifying model semantics or hardware. Because both workload characteristics and effective GPU throughput can shift across serving conditions, ViBE supports lightweight recalibration under workload/performance drift to refresh its routing and performance estimates when needed. Results show that ViBE consistently reduces execution-time imbalance and improves SLO attainment by 14%, while lowering P90 TTFT by up to 45%. We further show that the impact of hardware variability increases at scale, making variability-aware placement important for efficient, high-utilization LLM serving.
title ViBE: Co-Optimizing Workload Skew and Hardware Variability for MoE Serving
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00735