Aug 2026· Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking· 0 citations· 31 references
Computer Science
Abstract
Prefix caching has become a key technique for LLM serving, and nowadays the reusable KVCache contents are often hosted on distributed servers. For long-context LLM inferences with high cache hit ratio, cross-server KVCache transmission has become an emerging performance bottleneck; such network-intensive LLM inferences are increasingly prevalent in the coming era of agentic AI. However, existing LLM inference engines are essentially compute-centric; we find that they are highly inefficient when serving such workloads due to compute-stage service blocking and ignorance of KVCache-transfer cost. To efficiently serve network-intensive LLM inferences, in this paper, we design Sanic, an optimized LLM engine that treats KVCache transmission as a first-class citizen. Viewing KVCache loading and computation as equally-significant stages, Sanic decouples their service control and allows each stage to progress autonomously in an asynchronous manner, thereby improving the overall resource utilization. Moreover, when scheduling competing LLM inferences, Sanic treats the KVCache loading delay as an independent factor in service cost modeling, which is more accurate and can yield better scheduling decisions. Our testbed experiments with diverse benchmarks show that, Sanic can substantially enhance the service efficiency of network-intensive LLM inferences, improving the SLO-attainment by up to 61.67%.
CELLServe formalizes SLO-constrained joint resource provisioning as an optimization problem with a dedicated algorithm, and introduces an opportunistic instance merging strategy for decode phase functions to reclaim fragmented resources.
Zejian Wang, Nan Lin, Zinuo Cai et al.· ACM Transactions on Architec...· 0 citations
LLM inference has become a global-scale, heterogeneous workload spanning agents, retrieval, tool-use, code execution and multi-modal reasoning. These workloads naturally enable context reuse from overlapping inputs, creating a major opportunity to store and reuse the contexts'KV Caches instead of recomputing them. However, model-side advances that shrink the KV Cache and system-side advances that reduce compute, storage, and transfer costs are evolve independently within legacy cloud boundaries. We argue that future inference infrastructure should allow decoupling of compute and KV Cache storage across cloud and datacenters. The network becomes an active distribution channel; bandwidth, latency and pricing directly determines how the KV Cache should be managed. We propose a vision for an Internet for the KV Cache, with KV Cache management working as a content-distribution system. In this view, KV Cache storage and recompute decisions are driven by model, infrastructure, and application metrics, to enable adaptive, content-driven decisions for minimizing latency and cost.
Siddhant Ray, Nick Feamster, Junchen Jiang· 0 citations
The performance of multi-turn, agentic LLM inference is increasingly dominated by KV-Cache storage I/O rather than computation. In prevalent disaggregated architectures, loading the massive KV-Cache from external storage creates a fundamental imbalance: storage NICs on prefill engines become bandwidth-saturated, while those on decoding engines remain idle. This asymmetry severely constrains overall system throughput. We present DualPath, an inference system that breaks this bottleneck by introducing dual-path KV-Cache loading. Beyond the traditional storage-to-prefill path, DualPath enables a novel storage-to-decode path, in which the KV-Cache is loaded into decoding engines and then efficiently transferred to prefill engines via RDMA over the compute network. DualPath combines this optimized data path — which inherently avoids network congestion and avoids interference with latency-critical model execution communications — with a global scheduler that dynamically balances load across prefill and decode engines. Our evaluation on three models with production agentic workloads demonstrates that DualPath improves offline inference throughput by up to 1.87x on our in-house inference system. It can also improve online serving throughput by an average factor of 1.96x without violating SLO.
Yongtong Wu, Shaoyuan Chen, Rilin Huang et al.· Proceedings of the ACM SIGCO...· 0 citations
Prefix caching avoids prefill only when a repeated request returns to a server that still holds the prefix KV. Cache-blind balancing disperses that reuse; fixed affinity preserves it but can overload a server. CacheRoute resolves this tradeoff with a periodic routing plan. It admits high-rate keys to a stable warm set and places their assignments by expected load. Hot keys may use more than one destination, although every key in our primary semi-synthetic aggregate uses exactly one. On Llama-3.3-70B in fp8 across 60 H100 GPUs, CacheRoute sustains 176+/-11 QPS at a 3.5-s p99 SLO, 2.3x the strongest of five baselines. Served KV-cache hit rate rises from 64.1+/-1.3% under cache-blind balancing to 93.2+/-0.5%. A second semi-synthetic aggregate and controlled 8B and burst experiments separate the effects of affinity and placement. Two 32B workloads provide the counterexamples: when affinity recovers too little KV work, its residual load skew reduces or erases the improvement. We therefore recommend gating any deployment with a shadow replay rather than enabling affinity from workload statistics alone.
Cascade, an LLM serving system that estimates and continuously updates this per-request latency budget from request characteristics, KV-cache state, and current system load, and uses a single per-request budget to jointly coordinate request scheduling and KV-cache management across the memory hierarchy.
Muhammad Adnan, R. Mahapatra, Prashant J. Nair et al.· 0 citations