English

Predictable LLM Serving on GPU Clusters

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2025-08-29 v1

Abstract

Latency-sensitive inference on shared A100 clusters often suffers noisy-neighbor interference on the PCIe fabric, inflating tail latency and SLO violations. We present a fabric-agnostic, VM-deployable host-level controller that combines dynamic Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) reconfiguration, PCIe-aware placement, and lightweight guardrails (MPS quotas, cgroup I/O). It samples per-tenant tails and system signals, uses topology hints to avoid PCIe hot spots, and gates actions with dwell/cool-down to avoid thrash. On a single host and a 2-node (16-GPU) cluster, SLO miss-rate is reduced by \approx32\% (\approx1.5) and p99 latency improves \approx15\% with \leq5\% throughput cost versus static MIG and naive placement; ablations show MIG and placement contribute comparably. We also evaluate LLM serving with vLLM on OLMo 2 7B Instruct: TTFT p99 improves \approx10--15\% at \leq5\% cost without changing the controller.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.20274,
  title  = {Predictable LLM Serving on GPU Clusters},
  author = {Erfan Darzi and Shreeanant Bharadwaj and Sree Bhargavi Balija},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.20274},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:09:18.937Z