Interference-Aware Scheduling for Inference Serving

Machine learning inference applications have proliferated through diverse domains such as healthcare, security, and analytics. Recent work has proposed inference serving systems for improving the deployment and scalability of models. To improve resource utilization, multiple models can be co-located on the same backend machine. However, co-location can cause latency degradation due to interference and can subsequently violate latency requirements. Although interference-aware schedulers for general workloads have been introduced, they do not scale appropriately to heterogeneous inference serving systems where the number of co-location configurations grows exponentially with the number of models and machine types.

This paper proposes an interference-aware scheduler for heterogeneous inference serving systems, reducing the latency degradation from co-location interference. We characterize the challenges in predicting the impact of co-location interference on inference latency (e.g., varying latency degradation across machine types), and identify properties of models and hardware that should be considered during scheduling. We then propose a unified prediction model that estimates an inference model's latency degradation during co-location, and develop an interference-aware scheduler that leverages this predictor. Our preliminary results show that our interference-aware scheduler achieves 2× lower latency degradation than a commonly used least-loaded scheduler. We also discuss future research directions for interference-aware schedulers for inference serving systems.