Workload-Static Optical Circuit Switching For Scalable LLM Inference Decode
Organizations: Salience Labs Ltd, 100 Park Drive, Oxfordshire, OX14 4RY, United Kingdom · NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA · Hardware and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Heidelberg University, Germany
Abstract
LLM inference decode executes fine-grained collectives whose latency directly limits per-user interactivity, yet scale-up fabrics are still built from electronic packet switches designed for training. We observe that, for a given model deployment and parallelization, the communication structure of decode is fixed, and propose workload-static optical circuit switching (OCS): circuits are configured once per deployment, co-designed with model parallelism and with topology-aware collective schedules that turn spare accelerator ports into fewer communication phases or higher bandwidth. We evaluate this design with GXNET, a graph-based workload emulator coupled to analytical and flit-level network models grounded in hardware measurements. In a 576-accelerator scale-up domain serving 5T-parameter MoE models with up to 5M tokens of context, all-OCS fabrics improve interactivity by up to 65% and energy efficiency by up to 119% over 4:1 oversubscribed packet-switched fabrics.
Figures & tables
| Payload per call | ||||||
| Axis | Coll. | Calls | ||||
| Attention | ||||||
| world | AR | 128 | 4 KiB | 16 KiB | 64 KiB | |
| KVP | A2A | 128 | 66 B | 264 B | 1056 B | |
| TPA | none | 0 | – | – | – | |
| FFN | ||||||
Appendix figures & tables32 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| notation | meaning |
| Hamming weight | number of 1-bits of a mask; the Hamming distance of two labels is , the number of bit positions in which they differ |
| hypercube on bits; its generators are the unit masks, i.e., the masks of Hamming weight 1 | |
| with the additional generator , a fold | |
| folded cube , in which every node is joined to its antipode | |
| complete graph on nodes | |
| , | Cartesian product: two nodes are adjacent if they agree in one factor and are adjacent in the other; with factors |
| degree | topology | group | diameter |
| hypercube | |||
| folded cube | |||
| circulant | intermediate | ||
| ring |
| topology (deg, diam) | min. | rec. doubling | one-shot | coset-fact. | coset-fact. par. |
| (3, 3) | 3 | 3 / | 3 / | 3 / | 3 / |
| (4, 2) | 2 | 3 / | 2 / | 2 / | 2 / |
| (4, 4) | 4 | 4 / | 4 / | 4 / | 4 / |
| (5, 3) | 3 | 4 / | 3 / | 3 / | 3 / |
| (5, 2) | 2 | 4 / | 2 / | 3 / | 3 / |
| schedule | phases | bottleneck vol. | regime |
| recursive doubling | dominated | ||
| coset-factored | latency | ||
| coset-factored parallel | latency | ||
| RS+AG | Eq. ( 4 ) | bandwidth | |
| RS+AG parallel | Eq. ( 4 ) | bandwidth |
| mesh | axis | size | topology | deg | axis | ||
| (4, 64) | 0 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | s | |
| (4, 64) | 1 | 64 | 14 | 2 | 1 | s | |
| (16, 16) | 0 | 16 | 6 | 2 | 1 | s | |
| (16, 16) | 1 | 16 | 8 | 2 | 1 | s |
| schedule | case | topology | deg | axis | |
| ring (planning only) | multi-mesh | sub-cube | 5 | 7 | s |
| ring (planning only) | single mesh | ring | 2 | 17 | s |
| parallel RS+AG | multi-mesh | sub-cube | 5 | 7 | s |
| parallel RS+AG | single mesh | 5 | 7 | s |
| RTX4090 | A100 | H800 | H100 | B300 | |
| Luo et al. (2025) | Luo et al. (2025) | Luo et al. (2025) | (ours) | (ours) | |
| L1 cache | 32.0 | 33.0 | 32.0 | 41.1 | 34.1 |
| Shared memory | 30.1 | 29.0 | 29.0 | 29.0 | 28.6 |
| L2 cache | 273.0 | 202.8–408 | 264.5–502 | 276.2 | 276.8 |
| Case | Switch | Switch | MMU | GPU | Link | Total |
| total | core | + TLB | MMU | TLB | ||
| Low | 200 | 100 | 350 | 217 | 133 | 810 |
| Nominal | 300 | 200 | 250 | 155 | 95 | 810 |
| High | 500 | 400 | 50 | 31 | 19 | 810 |
| Parameters | Attention | Experts | ||||||||
| Model | Total | Active | Layers | Hidden | Type | Q / KV heads dim | Total / top- | Width | Vocab | KV cache per token |
| Megatron 235B | 0.23 T | 17 B | 96 | 1536 | GQA, full | 128 / 8 | 4096 | 51,200 | 144 KiB | |
| Megatron 1T | 1.10 T | 38 B | 128 | 2048 | GQA, full | 256 / 8 | 5440 | 51,200 | 256 KiB | |
| Megatron 5T | 5.00 T | 207 B | 128 | 8192 | GQA, full | 256 / 8 | 6144 | 51,200 | 1,024 KiB | |
| GPT-OSS-120B | 0.12 T | 5.7 B | 36 | 2880 | GQA, SW / full | 128 / 4 | 2880 | 201,088 | 9 KiB | |
| GPT-OSS-1T-like | 1.05 T | 21 B | 64 | 4608 | GQA, SW / full | 256 / 4 | 4608 | 201,088 | 16 KiB | |
| Accelerator | FP4 peak | HBM capacity | HBM bandwidth | Scale-up ports | Per-port bandwidth (unidirectional) | Kernel launch | In-graph launch |
| NVIDIA B200 | 20 PFLOP/s | 186 GB | 8 TB/s | 18 | 400 Gb/s | 2.5 s | 0.8 s |
| NVIDIA RX00 (Rubin-like) | 50 PFLOP/s | 288 GB | 22 TB/s | 36 | 400 Gb/s | 2.5 s | 0.8 s |
| Component | Variant | Value | Unit | Derivation / source |
| XPU (incl. host share) | B200 (GB200 NVL72) | W | , 120\text{,}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W} NVIDIA () ; NVIDIA () , $P_{\text{sw}}=$1.7\text{\,}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W} | |
| B300 (GB300 NVL72) | W | as above, 135\text{,}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W}$$ NVIDIA () ; Lenovo Press (Product Guide) | ||
| Rubin (VR200 NVL72) | W | as above, 220\text{,}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W} (Max-P) SemiAnalysis () ; Supermicro () , $P_{\text{sw}}=$3.4\text{\,}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W} (4 ASICs/tray NVIDIA () ) | ||
| EPS (scale-up), per port | W | switch tray: ; cross-check Broadcom (2025) ; TechInsights () ; IP Infusion () | ||
| W | extrapolated: rate, energy/bit Arista Networks () ; Arista Networks () | |||
| W | extrapolated: rate, energy/bit |
LLM Inference Acceleration
LLM inference acceleration develops algorithms and systems that reduce language-model latency, memory use, and serving cost while preserving output quality.
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