Seesaw: High-throughput LLM Inference via Model Re-sharding

Qidong Su, Wei Zhao, Xin Li, Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Chenhao Jiang, Zhanda Zhu, Kevin Song, Christina Giannoula, Gennady Pekhimenko

Keywords: large language model, inference, distributed inference

Abstract:

To improve the efficiency of distributed large language model (LLM) inference, various parallelization strategies, such as tensor and pipeline parallelism, have been proposed. However, the distinct computational characteristics inherent in the two stages of LLM inference—prefilling and decoding—render a single static parallelization strategy insufficient for the effective optimization of both stages.
In this work, we present Seesaw, an LLM inference engine optimized for throughput-oriented tasks. The key idea behind Seesaw is dynamic model re-sharding, a technique that facilitates the dynamic reconfiguration of parallelization strategies across stages, thereby maximizing throughput at both phases.
To mitigate re-sharing overhead and optimize computational efficiency, we employ tiered KV cache buffering and transition-minimizing scheduling. These approaches work synergistically to reduce the overhead caused by frequent stage transitions while ensuring maximum batching efficiency.
Our evaluation demonstrates that Seesaw achieves a throughput increase of up to 1.78$\times$ (1.36$\times$ on average) compared to vLLM, the most widely used state-of-the-art LLM inference engine.

Submission Number: 100