XY-Serve: End-to-End Versatile Production Serving for Dynamic LLM Workloads

The authors' abstract

This is the paper's own summary, in the paper's own words. It is dense on purpose — abstracts are written to compress.

Meeting growing demands for low latency and cost efficiency in production-grade large language model (LLM) serving systems requires integrating advanced optimization techniques. However, dynamic and unpredictable input-output lengths of LLM, compounded by these optimizations, exacerbate the issues of workload variability, making it difficult to maintain high efficiency on AI accelerators, especially DSAs with tile-based programming models. To address this challenge, we introduce XY-Serve, a versatile, Ascend NPU native, end-to-end production LLM-serving system. The core idea is an abstraction mechanism that smooths out the workload variability by decomposing computations into unified, hardware-friendly, fine-grained meta primitives. Then, kernels can efficiently execute without concerning the irregularity of workload. After this abstraction mechanism, for Attention, we propose a meta-kernel that computes the basic pattern of GEMM-Softmax-GEMM with architectural-aware tile sizes. For Linear, we introduce a virtual padding scheme that adapts to dynamic shape changes while using highly efficient GEMM primitives with assorted fixed tile sizes. XY-Serve sits harmoniously with vLLM. Experimental results show up to 95% end-to-end throughput improvement compared with current publicly available baselines on Ascend NPUs. We also set a new performance record for Linear (average 14.6% faster) and Attention (average 21.5% faster) kernels relative to existing libraries. Lastly, we demonstrate the generality of our technologies on GPU platform.