NanoFlow: Towards Optimal Large Language Model Serving Throughput

Large Language Models (LLMs) have resulted in a surging demand for planet-scale serving systems, where tens of thousands of GPUs continuously serve hundreds of millions of users. Consequently, throughput has emerged as a key metric that determines serving systems’ performance. Due to large model sizes and memory-intensive self-attention, LLM serving has been commonly assumed to be memory-bound. Through a detailed analysis, we show that despite having memory-intensive components, end-to-end LLM serving is compute bound for most common workloads and LLMs. Alas, most existing serving engines fall short from optimal compute utilization, because the heterogeneous operations that comprise LLM serving—compute, memory, networking—are executed sequentially within a device.

We propose NanoFlow, a novel serving framework that exploits intra-device parallelism, which overlaps the usage of heterogeneous resources within a single device. NanoFlow splits inputs into smaller nano-batches and duplicates operations to operate on each portion independently, enabling overlapping. NanoFlow automatically identifies the number, size, ordering, and GPU resource allocation of nano-batches to minimize the execution time, while considering the interference of concurrent operations. We evaluate NanoFlow's end-to-end serving throughput on several popular models such as LLaMA-2-70B, Mixtral 8×7B, LLaMA-3-8B, etc. With practical workloads, NanoFlow provides 1.91× throughput boost compared to state-of-the-art serving systems achieving 50% to 72 % of optimal throughput across popular models.