English

Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2025-09-04 v4 Artificial Intelligence Hardware Architecture

Abstract

Mooncake is the serving platform for Kimi, a leading LLM service provided by Moonshot AI. It features a KVCache-centric disaggregated architecture that separates the prefill and decoding clusters. It also leverages the underutilized CPU, DRAM, and SSD resources of the GPU cluster to implement a disaggregated cache of KVCache. The core of Mooncake is its KVCache-centric scheduler, which balances maximizing overall effective throughput while meeting latency-related Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Unlike traditional studies that assume all requests will be processed, Mooncake faces challenges due to highly overloaded scenarios. To mitigate these, we developed a prediction-based early rejection policy. Experiments show that Mooncake excels in long-context scenarios. Compared to the baseline method, Mooncake can achieve up to a 525% increase in throughput in certain simulated scenarios while adhering to SLOs. Under real workloads, Mooncake's innovative architecture enables Kimi to handle 75% more requests.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.00079,
  title  = {Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving},
  author = {Ruoyu Qin and Zheming Li and Weiran He and Mingxing Zhang and Yongwei Wu and Weimin Zheng and Xinran Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.00079},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

23 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:23:03.479Z