TAPAS: Thermal- and Power-Aware Scheduling for LLM Inference in Cloud Platforms

The rising demand for generative large language models (LLMs) poses challenges for thermal and power management in cloud datacenters. Traditional techniques often are inadequate for LLM inference due to the fine-grained, millisecond-scale execution phases, each with distinct performance, thermal, and power profiles. Additionally, LLM inference workloads are sensitive to various configuration parameters (e.g., model parallelism, size, and quantization) that involve trade-offs between performance, temperature, power, and output quality. Moreover, clouds often co-locate SaaS and IaaS workloads, each with different levels of visibility and flexibility. We propose TAPAS, a thermal- and power-aware framework designed for LLM inference clusters in the cloud. TAPAS enhances cooling and power oversubscription capabilities, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) while effectively handling emergencies (e.g., cooling and power failures). The system leverages historical temperature and power data, along with the adaptability of SaaS workloads, to: (1) efficiently place new GPU workload VMs within cooling and power constraints, (2) route LLM inference requests across SaaS VMs, and (3) reconfigure SaaS VMs to manage load spikes and emergency situations. Our evaluation on a large GPU cluster demonstrates significant reductions in thermal and power throttling events, boosting system efficiency.

Efficient Interactive LLM Serving with Proxy Model-based Sequence Length Prediction

Large language models (LLMs) have been driving a new wave of interactive AI applications across numerous domains. However, efficiently serving LLM inference requests is challenging due to their unpredictable execution times originating from the autoregressive nature of generative models. Existing LLM serving systems exploit first-come-first-serve (FCFS) scheduling, suffering from head-of-line blocking issues. To address the non-deterministic nature of LLMs and enable efficient interactive LLM serving, we present a speculative shortest-job-first (SSJF) scheduler that uses a light proxy model to predict LLM output sequence lengths. Our open-source SSJF implementation does not require changes to memory management or batching strategies. Evaluations on real-world datasets and production workload traces show that SSJF reduces average job completion times by 30.5-39.6% and increases throughput by 2.2-3.6x compared to FCFS schedulers, across no batching, dynamic batching, and continuous batching settings.

Decision Transformer as a Foundation Model for Partially Observable Continuous Control

Closed-loop control of nonlinear dynamical systems with partial-state observability demands expert knowledge of a diverse, less standardized set of theoretical tools. Moreover, it requires a delicate integration of controller and estimator designs to achieve the desired system behavior. To establish a general controller synthesis framework, we explore the Decision Transformer (DT) architecture. Specifically, we first frame the control task as predicting the current optimal action based on past observations, actions, and rewards, eliminating the need for a separate estimator design. Then, we leverage the pre-trained language models, i.e., the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series, to initialize DT and subsequently train it for control tasks using low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Our comprehensive experiments across five distinct control tasks, ranging from maneuvering aerospace systems to controlling partial differential equations (PDEs), demonstrate DT's capability to capture the parameter-agnostic structures intrinsic to control tasks. DT exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization abilities for completely new tasks and rapidly surpasses expert performance levels with a minimal amount of demonstration data. These findings highlight the potential of DT as a foundational controller for general control applications.