Abstract:Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of AI models. The high cost of hosting AI services on GPUs and their demanding service requirements, make it timely and challenging to lower service costs and guarantee service quality. While spot instances have long been offered with a large discount, spot preemptions have discouraged users from using them to host model replicas when serving AI models. To address this, we introduce SkyServe, a system that efficiently serves AI models over a mixture of spot and on-demand replicas across regions and clouds. SkyServe intelligently spreads spot replicas across different failure domains (e.g., regions or clouds) to improve availability and reduce correlated preemptions, overprovisions cheap spot replicas than required as a safeguard against possible preemptions, and dynamically falls back to on-demand replicas when spot replicas become unavailable. We compare SkyServe with both research and production systems on real AI workloads: SkyServe reduces cost by up to 44% while achieving high resource availability compared to using on-demand replicas. Additionally, SkyServe improves P50, P90, and P99 latency by up to 2.6x, 3.1x, 2.7x compared to other research and production systems.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into many online services. However, a major challenge in deploying LLMs is their high cost, due primarily to the use of expensive GPU instances. To address this problem, we find that the significant heterogeneity of GPU types presents an opportunity to increase GPU cost efficiency and reduce deployment costs. The broad and growing market of GPUs creates a diverse option space with varying costs and hardware specifications. Within this space, we show that there is not a linear relationship between GPU cost and performance, and identify three key LLM service characteristics that significantly affect which GPU type is the most cost effective: model request size, request rate, and latency service-level objective (SLO). We then present M\'elange, a framework for navigating the diversity of GPUs and LLM service specifications to derive the most cost-efficient set of GPUs for a given LLM service. We frame the task of GPU selection as a cost-aware bin-packing problem, where GPUs are bins with a capacity and cost, and items are request slices defined by a request size and rate. Upon solution, M\'elange derives the minimal-cost GPU allocation that adheres to a configurable latency SLO. Our evaluations across both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that M\'elange can reduce deployment costs by up to 77% as compared to utilizing only a single GPU type, highlighting the importance of making heterogeneity-aware GPU provisioning decisions for LLM serving. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/tyler-griggs/melange-release.