mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

TENT: A Declarative Slice Spraying Engine for Performant and Resilient Data Movement in Disaggregated LLM Serving

arXiv 2604.00368 ↗First posted 1 Apr 2026cs.DCcited by 1

On the map: Efficient LLM inference and serving → Serving systems and request scheduling

Abstract (arXiv)

Modern GPU clusters rely on complex, heterogeneous interconnects. As large language model (LLM) serving shifts toward agentic reasoning, KVCache becomes a first-class mobile asset, driving frequent migrations and massive elephant flows that dominate the execution critical path. Operating Mooncake Transfer Engine (TE) on thousands of GPUs exposed a fundamental flaw in existing frameworks: imperative, early-binding path selection. This rigidity results in state-blind striping that ignores congestion and grey failures, leading to bandwidth stranding. This also produces operational fragility where routine faults require manual intervention. We present TENT, a declarative orchestration engine that decouples transfer intent from physical execution. By abstracting interconnects into a unified resource pool, TENT shifts path resolution from initialization to slice-time late binding. Applications simply declare transfer intents, while TENT dynamically "sprays" fine-grained slices across rails based on real-time telemetry and predictive cost modeling. This orchestration eliminates head-of-line (HoL) blocking and enables transparent, sub-50 ms self-healing by rerouting slices around failures or degradations without application-level intervention. TENT serves as the production data plane for LLM inference and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines at multiple industrial clusters. Our evaluation shows that TE+ outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including Mooncake TE, NIXL, and UCCL. In LLM inference with SGLang HiCache, TE+ achieves up to 1.36x higher throughput and 26% lower P90 time-to-first-token (TTFT) than Mooncake TE. In RL pipelines, TENT accelerates parameter updates in Moonshot Checkpoint Engine by 20-26%.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving. Builds on 16 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

Builds on

16 of 36 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026DualPath: Breaking the Storage Bandwidth Bottleneck in Agentic LLM Inference25 Feb
  2. 2024Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving24 Jun
  3. 2024DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving18 Jan

Other references · 13

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  4. 2023SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programscited by 1,107
  5. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 755
  6. 2025Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligencecited by 523
  7. 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 446
  8. 2025LMCache: An Efficient KV Cache Layer for Enterprise-Scale LLM Inferencecited by 119
  9. 2023DeepSpeed-Chat: Easy, Fast and Affordable RLHF Training of ChatGPT-like Models at All Scalescited by 107
  10. 2025Demystifying NCCL: An In-depth Analysis of GPU Communication Protocols and Algorithmscited by 16
  11. 2025Beluga: A CXL-Based Memory Architecture for Scalable and Efficient LLM KVCache Managementcited by 11
  12. 2025An Extensible Software Transport Layer for GPU Networkingcited by 10
1 more
  1. 2025UB-Mesh: a Hierarchically Localized nD-FullMesh Datacenter Network Architecturecited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025RAPID-LLM: Resilience-Aware Performance analysis of Infrastructure for Distributed LLM Training and Inference ↗
  2. 2025Agent.xpu: Efficient Scheduling of Agentic LLM Workloads on Heterogeneous SoC
  3. 2026Ready Cohorts: Bounding GPU Opportunity and Avoiding Host Round Trips in LLM-Agent Control
  4. 2026FleetOpt: Analytical Fleet Provisioning for LLM Inference with Compress-and-Route as Implementation Mechanism
  5. 2024ConServe: Fine-Grained GPU Harvesting for LLM Online and Offline Co-Serving
  6. 2026Blink: CPU-Free LLM Inference by Delegating the Serving Stack to GPU and SmartNIC
  7. 2025DuetServe: Harmonizing Prefill and Decode for LLM Serving via Adaptive GPU Multiplexing
  8. 2025Boosting LLM Serving through Spatial-Temporal GPU Resource Sharing