Abstract:Batch inference has become a central mode of AI computation, yet existing inference engines still rely on execution models designed for interactive serving. When scaled to millions of sequences, batch workloads reveal two fundamental requirements: the ability to handle extreme inter- and intra-sequence load variation that emerges only at runtime, and the ability to sustain high utilization across large fleets of GPUs. Existing systems fail to meet these requirements, losing substantial fractions of achievable throughput. We introduce a new architectural foundation for batch inference: the sequence coroutine compute model, which represents each sequence as a fine-grained, event-driven coroutine. This model exposes expressive primitives that allow the runtime to reorganize work dynamically, enabling larger expert-level batches, mitigating stragglers, reallocating work across devices, and maintaining utilization even on cost-effective or memory-constrained GPUs. Building on this abstraction, we implement BatchGen, a production-ready system that uses the coroutine model at cluster scale. On a 128-GPU cluster, BatchGen reduces batch completion time by up to $2.3\times$, and on memory-constrained accelerators it outperforms the strongest offloading baseline by up to $9.6\times$. We will open-source BatchGen at https://github.com/batchgen-project/batchgen
Abstract:The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is increasingly favored for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently, but it depends on heterogeneous compute and memory resources. These factors jointly affect system Cost, Accuracy, and Performance (CAP), making trade-offs inevitable. Existing benchmarks often fail to capture these trade-offs accurately, complicating practical deployment decisions. To address this, we introduce MoE-CAP, a benchmark specifically designed for MoE systems. Our analysis reveals that achieving an optimal balance across CAP is difficult with current hardware; MoE systems typically optimize two of the three dimensions at the expense of the third-a dynamic we term the MoE-CAP trade-off. To visualize this, we propose the CAP Radar Diagram. We further introduce sparsity-aware performance metrics-Sparse Memory Bandwidth Utilization (S-MBU) and Sparse Model FLOPS Utilization (S-MFU)-to enable accurate performance benchmarking of MoE systems across diverse hardware platforms and deployment scenarios.
Abstract:This paper presents MoE-Gen, a high-throughput MoE inference system optimized for single-GPU execution. Existing inference systems rely on model-based or continuous batching strategies, originally designed for interactive inference, which result in excessively small batches for MoE's key modules-attention and expert modules-leading to poor throughput. To address this, we introduce module-based batching, which accumulates tokens in host memory and dynamically launches large batches on GPUs to maximize utilization. Additionally, we optimize the choice of batch sizes for each module in an MoE to fully overlap GPU computation and communication, maximizing throughput. Evaluation demonstrates that MoE-Gen achieves 8-31x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems employing model-based batching (FlexGen, MoE-Lightning, DeepSpeed), and offers even greater throughput improvements over continuous batching systems (e.g., vLLM and Ollama) on popular MoE models (DeepSeek and Mixtral) across offline inference tasks. MoE-Gen's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/EfficientMoE/MoE-Gen