Kant: An Efficient Unified Scheduling System for Large-Scale AI Clusters
This provides a practical engineering solution for improving scheduling in AI data centers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing strategies like Backfill and Binpack.
The paper tackles the challenge of scheduling AI workloads in large-scale clusters by presenting Kant, a unified scheduling system that achieves high resource utilization and efficiency while reducing fragmentation and communication overhead in clusters ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of GPUs.
As AI cluster sizes continue to expand and the demand for large-language-model (LLM) training and inference workloads grows rapidly, traditional scheduling systems face significant challenges in balancing resource utilization, scheduling efficiency, and service quality. This paper presents and evaluates Kant: an efficient unified scheduling platform designed for large-scale AI container clusters, supporting the co-scheduling of both training and inference jobs. Based on the practical implementation of the Kant system, we systematically define a set of key evaluation metrics for AI clusters, including GPU Allocation Ratio (GAR), Scheduling Occupancy Rate (SOR), GPU Node Fragmentation Ratio (GFR), Job Waiting Time Distribution (JWTD), and Job Training Time Estimation Distribution (JTTED), providing a foundation for quantitative performance analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that Kant achieves exceptional performance in clusters ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of GPUs. By leveraging scheduling strategies such as Backfill and Enhanced Binpack (E-Binpack), the system significantly improves resource utilization and scheduling efficiency, while effectively reducing resource fragmentation and communication overhead in distributed training. The system has been deployed in multiple AI data center clusters, where it stably supports large-scale intelligent computing workloads. This work provides a practical engineering approach for building high-performance, highly available, AI-native scheduling infrastructure.