LLMServingSim2.0: A Unified Simulator for Heterogeneous Hardware and Serving Techniques in LLM Infrastructure

This paper introduces LLMServingSim2.0, a system simulator designed for exploring heterogeneous hardware in large-scale LLM serving systems. LLMServingSim2.0 addresses two key limitations of its predecessor: (1) integrating hardware models into system-level simulators is non-trivial due to the lack of a clear abstraction, and (2) existing simulators support only a narrow subset of serving techniques, leaving no infrastructure that captures the breadth of approaches in modern LLM serving. To overcome these issues, LLMServingSim2.0 adopts trace-driven performance modeling, accompanied by an operator-level latency profiler, enabling the integration of new accelerators with a single command. It further embeds up-to-date serving techniques while exposing flexible interfaces for request routing, cache management, and scheduling policies. In a TPU case study, our profiler requires 18.5x fewer LoC and outperforms the predecessor's hardware-simulator integration, demonstrating LLMServingSim2.0's low-effort hardware extensibility. Our experiments further show that LLMServingSim2.0 reproduces GPU-based LLM serving with 1.9% error, while maintaining practical simulation time, making it a comprehensive platform for both hardware developers and LLM service providers.

LLMServingSim: A HW/SW Co-Simulation Infrastructure for LLM Inference Serving at Scale

Recently, there has been an extensive research effort in building efficient large language model (LLM) inference serving systems. These efforts not only include innovations in the algorithm and software domains but also constitute developments of various hardware acceleration techniques. Nevertheless, there is a lack of simulation infrastructure capable of accurately modeling versatile hardware-software behaviors in LLM serving systems without extensively extending the simulation time. This paper aims to develop an effective simulation tool, called LLMServingSim, to support future research in LLM serving systems. In designing LLMServingSim, we focus on two limitations of existing simulators: (1) they lack consideration of the dynamic workload variations of LLM inference serving due to its autoregressive nature, and (2) they incur repetitive simulations without leveraging algorithmic redundancies in LLMs. To address these limitations, LLMServingSim simulates the LLM serving in the granularity of iterations, leveraging the computation redundancies across decoder blocks and reusing the simulation results from previous iterations. Additionally, LLMServingSim provides a flexible framework that allows users to plug in any accelerator compiler-and-simulation stacks for exploring various system designs with heterogeneous processors. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMServingSim produces simulation results closely following the performance behaviors of real GPU-based LLM serving system with less than 14.7% error rate, while offering 91.5x faster simulation speed compared to existing accelerator simulators.