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DUAL-BLADE is introduced as a dual-path KV cache residency framework for edge LLM inference, addressing the memory limitations by dynamically assigning KV tensors to either a page-cache path or an NVMe-direct path based on memory availability. The NVMe-direct path bypasses the filesystem, enabling low-overhead direct storage access. Results show DUAL-BLADE reduces prefill and decode latency by up to 33.1% and 42.4%, respectively, while improving SSD utilization by 2.2x.
Edge LLM inference gets a serious speed boost: DUAL-BLADE's dual-path KV cache slashes latency by up to 42% and doubles SSD utilization.
The increasing deployment of Large Language Model (LLM) inference on edge AI systems demands efficient execution under tight memory budgets. A key challenge arises from Key-Value (KV) caches, which often exceed available device memory. Although NVMe-based offloading offers scalable capacity, existing file-based designs rely heavily on the kernel page cache, leading to cache thrashing, unpredictable latency, and high software overhead under memory pressure. We present DUAL-BLADE, a dual-path KV residency framework that dynamically assigns KV tensors to either a page-cache path or an NVMe-direct path based on runtime memory availability. The NVMe-direct path bypasses the filesystem by mapping KV tensors to contiguous logical block address (LBA) regions, enabling low-overhead direct storage access. DUAL-BLADE further incorporates adaptive pipeline parallelism to overlap storage I/O with GPU DMA, improving inference throughput. Our evaluation shows that DUAL-BLADE substantially mitigates I/O bottlenecks, reducing prefill and decode latency by up to 33.1% and 42.4%, respectively, while improving SSD utilization by 2.2x across diverse memory budgets.
