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KVDirect: Distributed Disaggregated LLM Inference

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arxiv 2501.14743 v1 pith:FMIIDHTL submitted 2024-12-13 cs.DC cs.LGcs.PF

KVDirect: Distributed Disaggregated LLM Inference

classification cs.DC cs.LGcs.PF
keywords inferencekvdirectdisaggregatedresourcecachecommunicationdistributedreduces
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the new foundation for many applications, reshaping human society like a storm. Disaggregated inference, which separates prefill and decode stages, is a promising approach to improving hardware utilization and service quality. However, due to inefficient inter-node communication, existing systems restrict disaggregated inference to a single node, limiting resource allocation flexibility and reducing service capacity. This paper introduces KVDirect, which optimizes KV cache transfer to enable a distributed disaggregated LLM inference. KVDirect achieves this through the following contributions. First, we propose a novel tensor-centric communication mechanism that reduces the synchronization overhead in traditional distributed GPU systems. Second, we design a custom communication library to support dynamic GPU resource scheduling and efficient KV cache transfer. Third, we introduce a pull-based KV cache transfer strategy that reduces GPU resource idling and improves latency. Finally, we implement KVDirect as an open-source LLM inference framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that KVDirect reduces per-request latency by 55% compared to the baseline across diverse workloads under the same resource constraints.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving

    cs.DC 2026-06 accept novelty 6.5

    KV-cache serving systems concentrate into five archetypes under a four-axis taxonomy, with ownership explaining residual distributed design variance and seven measurement gaps blocking next steps.

  2. Online Linear Programming for Multi-Objective Routing in LLM Serving

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Online LP bid-price routing with warm-started dual gradient updates substantially improves multi-SLO LLM decode routing over heuristics in simulation.

  3. SAC: Disaggregated KV Cache System for Sparse Attention LLMs with CXL

    cs.DC 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SAC uses CXL to fetch only top-k KV cache entries for sparse attention models, reporting 2.1x throughput, 9.7x lower TTFT and 1.8x lower TBT versus RDMA baselines on DeepSeek-V3.2.

  4. Tackling the Data-Parallel Load Balancing Bottleneck in LLM Serving: Practical Online Routing at Scale

    cs.DC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BalanceRoute reduces data-parallel imbalance in LLM inference via F-score routing and lookahead, yielding higher end-to-end throughput on 144-NPU clusters versus vLLM baselines.

  5. Tackling the Data-Parallel Load Balancing Bottleneck in LLM Serving: Practical Online Routing at Scale

    cs.DC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BalanceRoute uses a piecewise-linear F-score (with optional short lookahead) for sticky request routing in LLM serving, reducing DP imbalance and raising end-to-end throughput versus vLLM baselines on production and A...