arXiv:2605. 01708v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Contemporary systems serving large language models (LLMs) have adopted prefill-decode disaggregation to load-balance between the compute-bound prefill phase and the memory-bound decode phase.
By Yipin Guo, Siddharth Joshi
The paper presents py‑kvcache, a new KV offload connector for vLLM that uses asynchronous direct I/O, bounded shared staging, and scheduler‑aware preloading to improve external KV caching performance on NVMe SSDs. Experiments across synthetic workloads, long‑context benchmarks, and production traces show that py‑kvcache can load 80k‑token prefixes 2.0× faster than LMCache, with preloading contributing an additional 1.34× speedup, and achieves overall performance within 4% of native vLLM KV Offload. The study highlights that cache effectiveness depends on transfer granularity, intermediate memory use, and scheduling timing rather than just device bandwidth, indicating that external KV caching should be considered a setup‑specific admission decision.
By Joseph Kanichai, Tiziano De Matteis, Animesh Trivedi
The paper argues that for large‑context autoregressive language‑model inference, memory bandwidth—specifically the Key‑Value (KV) cache—becomes the limiting resource rather than arithmetic throughput. It analytically derives how arithmetic intensity decays with context length for NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA B200, and AMD MI300X, identifies crossover points where KV traffic overtakes weight traffic, and evaluates representative techniques across five compression domains. The study finds a three‑regime behavior: below the crossover, weight traffic dominates and KV compression offers little benefit; beyond it, KV traffic dominates and compression methods trade quality for bandwidth, with paging and prefix sharing being lossless but capacity‑limited, while quantization and eviction directly reduce bandwidth at the cost of accuracy.
whyItMatters":"The work provides a unified analytical framework and a standardized protocol that enable consistent comparison of KV‑compression techniques across hardware and workloads, guiding practitioners in selecting appropriate methods for long‑context inference."
By Tejinder Singh
The paper identifies a missing cost term in the Tensor‑Memory Equilibrium (TME) model for emulating fp64 on GPUs: the per‑input deconstruction cost required before matrix multiplication can proceed. By adding this term and calibrating it against cuBLAS, the authors derive a closed‑form operational‑intensity threshold (OI*) below which emulation cannot match native fp64 performance. On an NVIDIA B300 GPU, this threshold is about 0.56 FLOP/B, limiting the speed‑ups of memory‑bound kernels such as GEMV, SpMV, and low‑batch GEMV to 0.3–0.9× native, and reducing the 7‑point stencil speed‑up from 3.1× to 1.8×, while dense GEMM remains unaffected.
By Harun Bayraktar, John Gunnels, Peter Caday
arXiv:2609.14507v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Single-GPU long-context inference with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models requires spilling the key-value cache (KVCache) to CPU memory. The spilled KV...
By Enda Yu, Dezun Dong, Xiangke Liao
arXiv:2604. 26968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache memory management is the primary bottleneck limiting throughput and cost-efficiency in large-scale GPU inference serving.
By Sanjeev Rao Ganjihal