A Cost-Effective Near-Storage Processing Solution for Offline Inference of Long-Context LLMs

The computational and memory demands of large language models for generative inference present significant challenges for practical deployment. One promising solution targeting offline inference is offloading-based batched inference, which extends the GPU's memory hierarchy with host memory and storage. However, it often suffers from substantial I/O overhead, primarily due to the large KV cache sizes that scale with batch size and context window length. In this paper, we introduce HILOS, a framework that boosts offline inference throughput using near-storage processing. The core of HILOS is attention near storage, which offloads memory-intensive attention operations to near-storage accelerators, reducing traffic across the system interconnect. Building on attention near storage, HILOS incorporates three additional optimizations. First, cooperative X-cache minimizes KV cache I/O by exploiting available host resources after offloading. Second, delayed KV cache writeback hides storage write latency and mitigates storage write amplification. Finally, a memory-efficient attention accelerator sustains high throughput for long sequences within the resource constraints of NSP devices. We implemented and evaluated HILOS on a real system equipped with 16 SmartSSDs. Compared to state-of-the-art offloading-based inference frameworks, HILOS achieves up to 7.86x throughput while reducing energy consumption by up to 85%. The source code for HILOS is available at https://github.com/hongsunjang/HILOS.