vAttention: Dynamic Memory Management for Serving LLMs without PagedAttention

Abstract

PagedAttention is a popular approach for dynamic memory allocation in LLM serving systems. It enables on-demand allocation of GPU memory to mitigate KV cache fragmentation - a phenomenon that crippled the batch size (and consequently throughput) in prior systems. However, in trying to allocate physical memory at runtime, PagedAttention ends up changing the virtual memory layout of the KV cache from contiguous to non-contiguous. Such a design leads to non-trivial programming and performance overheads.

Topics & Concepts