cs.DCAug 13, 2026

TEMPO: Makespan-Aware Expert-Parallel Load Balancing Across Memory- and Compute-Bound Regimes

Authors: Jie LiChenxin JiaJinliang ShenCunzhuang LiuRuiyi DingJianwen XianKang HeChengru Song

Organizations: KlingAI Research

Abstract

In expert-parallel (EP) MoE serving, every layer synchronizes at the slowest GPU. Dispatchers balance token counts (EPLB, LPLB, UltraEP) or activated-expert counts (METRO), assuming expert time is linear in one. Measurements on two datacenter GPU generations show it is neither: below \nstar ⁣ ⁣156\nstar\!\approx\!156--168168 tokens, HBM weight streaming dominates---cost attaches to \emph{activated replicas}, not tokens; above it, grouped GEMM rounds tokens to 128-tile MM-tiles, so \emph{splitting} an expert adds padded compute. A max-affine profile t=max(a+bG,c+βN)t=\max(a+bG,\,c+βN) captures both regimes. Realistic decode batches hold hot experts in the linear regime and cold in the flat \emph{simultaneously}; recorded batches show proxy dispatches differ by 1.41.4--1.6×1.6\times in modeled block time (p95 up to 1.7×1.7\times), and \emph{which} proxy wins flips with the regime. We formalize per-batch dispatch as a fixed-charge makespan problem---NP-hard on two fully replicated GPUs, polynomial in degenerate limits---and present \sys{}, a makespan-aware dispatcher solving it in milliseconds off the critical path; its SGLang integration runs out-of-process and fuses dispatch with count collection into one in-graph kernel. Anchored by an 8-GPU TestbedA microbenchmark, \sys{} stays within 1% of the best fixed baseline everywhere and wins by up to 15.5%15.5\% where regimes mix. End-to-end on TestbedB, Qwen3-235B (inside the win region) gains 44--6%6\% throughput and cuts p99 latency by 15.6%{\sim}15.6\%; DeepSeek-V3 (outside, communication-dominated) shows only mechanism cost. A phase diagram, not a universal win, is the claim: it predicts both outcomes before deployment.

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