DCMay 22
XWind: A Cross-site Router for Large Language Model Inference Serving at Renewable Energy FarmsTella Rajashekhar Reddy, Atharva Deshmukh, Liangcheng Yu et al.
AI power demand is growing at an unprecedented rate while power grids are often ailing and struggle to keep up. Grid expansion comes with high capital expenditure and long-distance transmission losses, yet there is abundant renewable energy at the source, just not matched to demand. This paper proposes a complementary AI infrastructure deployment model, AI Greenferencing, that brings modular AI compute to renewable energy sources, focusing on wind, allowing AI footprint expansion, generating local behind-the-meter demand for renewable sites, and helping ease the growing strain on power utilities. Our feasibility analysis shows that 890+ GW of wind capacity lies within 50 ms network round trip time of Azure data centers, and that site-wise right-sizing combined with spatial complementarity of wind energy keeps aggregate fleet utilization on par with traditional deployments. To serve inference requests under variable wind power, we build XWind, a lightweight, reactive, and workload-agnostic AI inference router that uses only real-time signals: inference latency, KV-cache utilization, and queue depth, to dynamically configure sites and distribute requests. Evaluated on a real 64-GPU A100 testbed emulating three wind-powered sites with Azure production traces, XWind reduces P99 end-to-end latency by up to 52% over the strongest contender (also our idea) and by up to 98% over baselines such as power-capping and GPU idling, with consistent gains across workload types, load levels, and GPU generations.
DCNov 16, 2024Code
Improving training time and GPU utilization in geo-distributed language model trainingPalak, Tella Rajashekhar Reddy, Bhaskar Kataria et al.
The widespread adoption of language models (LMs) has caused a huge surge in demand for GPUs. Training large LMs requires tens of thousands of GPUs and housing them in the same datacenter (DC) is a challenge due to many constraints including availability of peak power. We focus on training such models across multiple DCs connected via the Wide-Area-Network (WAN). We built Atlas that speeds up the training time using novel workload-aware temporal bandwidth sharing and other design choices. While Atlas improves the training time, it does not completely eliminate the bubbles (idle GPU cycles). We built BubbleTea that runs prefill-as-a-service (part of LM inference) during the bubbles thus improving the GPU utilization without any impact on training. Compared to state-of-the-art designs, Atlas and BubbleTea together achieve up to 17x faster training, and up to 94% GPU utilization. The code will be open-sourced.
DCOct 17, 2025
BeLLMan: Controlling LLM CongestionTella Rajashekhar Reddy, Atharva Deshmukh, Karan Tandon et al.
Large language model (LLM) applications are blindfolded to the infrastructure underneath and generate tokens autoregressively, indifferent to the system load, thus risking inferencing latency inflation and poor user experience. Our first-cut controller, named beLLMan, enables the LLM infrastructure to actively and progressively signal the first-party LLM application to adjust the output length in response to changing system load. On a real testbed with H100 GPUs, beLLMan helps keep inferencing latency under control (upto 8X lower end-to-end latency) and reduces energy consumption by 25% (while serving 19% more requests) during periods of congestion for a summarization workload.
DCMay 15, 2025
AI Greenferencing: Routing AI Inferencing to Green Modular Data Centers with HeronTella Rajashekhar Reddy, Palak, Rohan Gandhi et al.
AI power demand is growing unprecedentedly thanks to the high power density of AI compute and the emerging inferencing workload. On the supply side, abundant wind power is waiting for grid access in interconnection queues. In this light, this paper argues bringing AI workload to modular compute clusters co-located in wind farms. Our deployment right-sizing strategy makes it economically viable to deploy more than 6 million high-end GPUs today that could consume cheap, green power at its source. We built Heron, a cross-site software router, that could efficiently leverage the complementarity of power generation across wind farms by routing AI inferencing workload around power drops. Using 1-week ofcoding and conversation production traces from Azure and (real) variable wind power traces, we show how Heron improves aggregate goodput of AI compute by up to 80% compared to the state-of-the-art.