Loki: A System for Serving ML Inference Pipelines with Hardware and Accuracy Scaling

TL;DR

Loki is a system that combines hardware and accuracy scaling to improve ML inference pipeline serving, significantly increasing capacity and reducing violations compared to existing methods.

Contribution

Loki introduces a novel framework and query routing algorithm for integrated hardware and accuracy scaling in inference pipelines.

Findings

Effective capacity increased by over 2.7x with accuracy scaling.

Loki reduces SLO violations by up to 10x compared to state-of-the-art.

Maintains high accuracy with minimal compromises.

Abstract

The rapid adoption of machine learning (ML) has underscored the importance of serving ML models with high throughput and resource efficiency. Traditional approaches to managing increasing query demands have predominantly focused on hardware scaling, which involves increasing server count or computing power. However, this strategy can often be impractical due to limitations in the available budget or compute resources. As an alternative, accuracy scaling offers a promising solution by adjusting the accuracy of ML models to accommodate fluctuating query demands. Yet, existing accuracy scaling techniques target independent ML models and tend to underperform while managing inference pipelines. Furthermore, they lack integration with hardware scaling, leading to potential resource inefficiencies during low-demand periods. To address the limitations, this paper introduces Loki, a system designed for serving inference pipelines effectively with both hardware and accuracy scaling. Loki incorporates an innovative theoretical framework for optimal resource allocation and an effective query routing algorithm, aimed at improving system accuracy and minimizing latency deadline violations. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that through accuracy scaling, the effective capacity of a fixed-size cluster can be enhanced by more than $2.7\times$ compared to relying solely on hardware scaling. When compared with state-of-the-art inference-serving systems, Loki achieves up to a $10\times$ reduction in Service Level Objective (SLO) violations, with minimal compromises on accuracy and while fulfilling throughput demands.