Ferran Agullo

Pol G. Recasens, Ferran Agullo, Yue Zhu et al.

Large language models have been widely adopted across different tasks, but their auto-regressive generation nature often leads to inefficient resource utilization during inference. While batching is commonly used to increase throughput, performance gains plateau beyond a certain batch size, especially with smaller models, a phenomenon that existing literature typically explains as a shift to the compute-bound regime. In this paper, through an in-depth GPU-level analysis, we reveal that large-batch inference remains memory-bound, with most GPU compute capabilities underutilized due to DRAM bandwidth saturation as the primary bottleneck. To address this, we propose a Batching Configuration Advisor (BCA) that optimizes memory allocation, reducing GPU memory requirements with minimal impact on throughput. The freed memory and underutilized GPU compute capabilities can then be leveraged by concurrent workloads. Specifically, we use model replication to improve serving throughput and GPU utilization. Our findings challenge conventional assumptions about LLM inference, offering new insights and practical strategies for improving resource utilization, particularly for smaller language models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FerranAgulloLopez/vLLMBatchingMemoryGap.

Ferran Agullo, Joan Oliveras, Chen Wang et al.

With the rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-adapters have become increasingly common, providing lightweight specialization of large-scale models. Serving hundreds or thousands of these adapters on a single GPU allows request aggregation, increasing throughput, but may also cause request starvation if GPU memory limits are exceeded. To address this issue, this study focuses on determining the joint configuration of concurrent and parallel adapters that maximizes GPU throughput without inducing starvation, given heterogeneous adapter and traffic properties. We propose a data-driven ML approach leveraging interpretable models to tackle this caching problem and introduce the first Digital Twin capable of reproducing an LLM-adapter serving system, enabling efficient training data generation. Experiments with the vLLM framework and LoRA adapters show that the Digital Twin reproduces throughput within 5.1% of real results, while the ML approach predicts optimal numbers of concurrent and parallel adapters with an error of at most 7.2% under heterogeneous, real-world workloads. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FerranAgulloLopez/GPULLMAdapterOptimization.