Data Driven Optimization of GPU efficiency for Distributed LLM-Adapter Serving
Large Language Model (LLM) adapters enable low-cost model specialization, but introduce complex caching and scheduling challenges in distributed serving systems where hundreds of adapters must be hosted concurrently. While prior work has largely focused on latency and throughput optimization, minimizing GPU resource requirements through near-peak utilization remains largely underexplored. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline that, for a given workload, computes an adapter placement that serves the workload with the minimum number of GPUs while avoiding request starvation and GPU memory errors. To that end, the approach identifies the maximum feasible throughput attainable on each GPU by leveraging accurate performance predictions learned from real serving behavior. The proposed pipeline integrates three components: (i) a Digital Twin (DT) tailored to LLM-adapter serving, (ii) a distilled machine learning (ML) model trained on DT-generated data, and (iii) a greedy placement algorithm that exploits ML-based performance estimates to maximize GPU efficiency. The DT emulates real system dynamics with high fidelity, achieving below 5% throughput estimation error while executing up to 90x faster than full LLM benchmarking across both predictable and unpredictable workloads. The learned ML models further accelerate performance estimation with marginal accuracy degradation, enabling scalable optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that the pipeline substantially improves GPU efficiency, reducing the number of GPUs required to sustain target workloads by 60% on average across the evaluated scenarios. Beyond GPU efficiency, the pipeline can be adapted to alternative objectives, such as latency minimization, highlighting its versatility for future large-scale LLM serving infrastructures.