# Fast Distributed Inference Serving for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05920 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05920/

## Key facts

- Cited by 145 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 25 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Serving systems and request scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/inference/serving-systems-and-request-scheduling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02150/) (2019)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04473/) (2021)
- [FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06865/) (2023)
- [Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05889/) (2017)
- [DeepSpeed Inference: Enabling Efficient Inference of Transformer Models at Unprecedented Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00032/) (2022)
- [Clipper: A Low-Latency Online Prediction Serving System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03079/) (2016)
- [Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02464/) (2020)
- [Petals: Collaborative Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01188/) (2022)
- [TensorFlow-Serving: Flexible, High-Performance ML Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06139/) (2017)
- [TurboTransformers: An Efficient GPU Serving System For Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05680/) (2020)
- [MPCFormer: fast, performant and private Transformer inference with MPC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01452/) (2022)
- [Fine-tuning Language Models over Slow Networks using Activation Compression with Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01299/) (2022)
- [BigDataBench: a Big Data Benchmark Suite from Web Search Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1307.0320/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 145)

- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02310/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Efficient Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14294/) (2024)
- [CacheGen: KV Cache Compression and Streaming for Fast Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07240/) (2023)
- [Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00079/) (2024)
- [SARATHI: Efficient LLM Inference by Piggybacking Decodes with Chunked Prefills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16369/) (2023)
- [Llumnix: Dynamic Scheduling for Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03243/) (2024)
- [Cost-Efficient Large Language Model Serving for Multi-turn Conversations with CachedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19708/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18279/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model Acceleration based on KV Cache Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19442/) (2024)
- [RAGCache: Efficient Knowledge Caching for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12457/) (2024)
- [vAttention: Dynamic Memory Management for Serving LLMs without PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04437/) (2024)
- [BurstGPT: A Real-world Workload Dataset to Optimize LLM Serving Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17644/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Resource-efficient LLM and Multimodal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08092/) (2024)
- [Efficient LLM Scheduling by Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15792/) (2024)
- [S3: Increasing GPU Utilization during Generative Inference for Higher Throughput](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06000/) (2023)
- [ServerlessLLM: Low-Latency Serverless Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14351/) (2024)
- [Fairness in Serving Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00588/) (2023)
- [Preble: Efficient Distributed Prompt Scheduling for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00023/) (2024)
- [MemServe: Context Caching for Disaggregated LLM Serving with Elastic Memory Pool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17565/) (2024)
- [Efficient Interactive LLM Serving with Proxy Model-based Sequence Length Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08509/) (2024)
- [Efficiently Scaling LLM Reasoning with Certaindex](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20993/) (2024)
- [Autellix: An Efficient Serving Engine for LLM Agents as General Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13965/) (2025)
- [KVFlow: Efficient Prefix Caching for Accelerating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07400/) (2025)
- [POD-Attention: Unlocking Full Prefill-Decode Overlap for Faster LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18038/) (2024)
- [Continuum: Efficient and Robust Multi-Turn LLM Agent Scheduling with KV Cache Time-to-Live](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02230/) (2025)
- [Optimizing RLHF Training for Large Language Models with Stage Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13221/) (2024)
- [NEO: Saving GPU Memory Crisis with CPU Offloading for Online LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01142/) (2024)
- [Don't Stop Me Now: Embedding Based Scheduling for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01035/) (2024)
- [InferCept: Efficient Intercept Support for Augmented Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01869/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) power a new generation of interactive AI applications exemplified by ChatGPT. The interactive nature of these applications demands low latency for LLM inference. Existing LLM serving systems use run-to-completion processing for inference jobs, which suffers from head-of-line blocking and long latency. We present FastServe, a distributed inference serving system for LLMs. FastServe exploits the autoregressive pattern of LLM inference to enable preemption at the granularity of each output token. FastServe uses preemptive scheduling to minimize latency with a novel skip-join Multi-Level Feedback Queue scheduler. Based on the new semi-information-agnostic setting of LLM inference, the scheduler leverages the input length information to assign an appropriate initial queue for each arrival job to join. The higher priority queues than the joined queue are skipped to reduce demotions. We design an efficient GPU memory management mechanism that proactively offloads and uploads intermediate state between GPU memory and host memory for LLM inference. We build a system prototype of FastServe and experimental results show that compared to the state-of-the-art solution vLLM, FastServe improves the throughput by up to 31.4x and 17.9x under the same average and tail latency requirements, respectively.