FastEEP: Fast Intra-Instance Elastic Scaling for Expert-Parallel MoE Serving
Organizations: Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPADS), Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Abstract
Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) has become the standard deployment configuration for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models in production. Meanwhile, the highly dynamic nature of LLM workloads requires providers to continuously adjust serving capacity to match fluctuating demand. Scaling MoE serving cannot be efficiently achieved by simply adding or removing serving instances; instead, it often requires resizing the EP group within an existing instance, which we refer to as intra-instance scaling.Existing inference engines primarily rely on instance-level scaling, which destroys and reconstructs entire serving instances, incurring substantial scaling overhead. We present FastEEP (Fast Elastic Expert Parallel), a fast intra-instance scaling system for MoE serving based on the principle of Partial Reuse. FastEEP reuses existing runtime state across worker execution, GPU memory, and communication by separating reusable execution structures from the resources activated by the current EP configuration. This separation enables coordinated resource reclamation and reconfiguration while preserving costly-to-reconstruct state, allowing fast EP scaling without full instance teardown and reconstruction. Our evaluation shows that FastEEP achieves 4.5x--11.7x faster scaling than the existing vLLM-based approach across different models, enabling efficient, fine-grained scaling of MoE serving.
Figures & tables
| State | Cost | EP-dep. | Today | Reused |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Worker process, executor, kernels | 24 s startup | no | destroyed | retained |
| Communication domains, RDMA buffers | 13 s setup | members only | rebuilt | subdomain derived |
| CUDA context | 0.32 GiB | no | destroyed | retained |
| CUDA Graphs | 36 s, 1.47 GiB | no | recaptured | replayed |
| Weights, KV cache, workspaces | 9.62 / 71.04 GiB | sizes only | reloaded | pages refilled |
| Expert placement, request routing | – | yes | rebuilt | rewritten in place |
Efficient Inference
Efficient inference reduces the compute, memory, latency, or energy needed to produce accurate predictions, posterior estimates, and decisions.
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