HexGen-2: Disaggregated Generative Inference of LLMs in Heterogeneous Environment

TL;DR

HexGen-2 introduces a distributed system that disaggregates LLM inference across heterogeneous GPUs, optimizing resource allocation and communication to improve throughput and reduce latency and costs.

Contribution

It presents a novel scheduling algorithm for disaggregated LLM inference on heterogeneous GPUs, leveraging graph partitioning and max-flow algorithms for resource optimization.

Findings

Up to 2.0x increase in serving throughput.

1.5x reduction in inference latency.

Achieves similar performance at 30% lower cost.

Abstract

Disaggregating the prefill and decoding phases represents an effective new paradigm for generative inference of large language models (LLM), which eliminates prefill-decoding interference and optimizes resource allocation. However, it is still an open problem about how to deploy the disaggregated inference paradigm across a group of heterogeneous GPUs, which can be an economical alternative to deployment over homogeneous high-performance GPUs. Towards this end, we introduce HexGen-2, a distributed system for efficient and economical LLM serving on heterogeneous GPUs following the disaggregated paradigm. Built on top of HexGen, the core component of HexGen-2 is a scheduling algorithm that formalizes the allocation of disaggregated LLM inference computations and communications over heterogeneous GPUs and network connections as a constraint optimization problem. We leverage the graph partitioning and max-flow algorithms to co-optimize resource allocation, parallel strategies for distinct inference phases, and the efficiency of inter-phase key-value (KV) cache communications. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate HexGen-2, i.e., on OPT (30B) and Llama-2 (70B) models in various real-world settings, the results reveal that HexGen-2 delivers up to a 2.0 times and on average a 1.3 times improvement in serving throughput, reduces the average inference latency by 1.5 times compared with state-of-the-art systems given the same price budget, and achieves comparable inference performance with a 30% lower price budget.