通过跨层调度缓解MoE模型推理中的负载不均问题。
EasyBalance: Cross-Layer Load Balancing in Distributed MoE Inference

- 利用其他层专家作为冗余资源,动态调度跨层任务
- 实验显示减少40%以上GPU空闲时间
- 无需修改设备映射,适合大规模MoE部署
专家并行的分布式MoE模型推理中,负载均衡已成为关键挑战。由于路由分布通常不均,承载轻负载专家的设备需等待最重负载完成,导致效率低下。现有方法多依赖层内专家复制或迁移,引入额外开销且扩展性受限。为此,我们提出EasyBalance,一种无需修改专家-设备映射的跨层负载均衡策略,实现零额外开销与即时适应。核心洞察为:(1)其他层的专家可视为当前层的天然冗余;(2)跨层工作量可联合执行以缓解个体不平衡。基于此,EasyBalance在每步贪婪调度部分跨层任务,延迟剩余任务以待后续平衡机会,有效利用跨层不平衡缓解机制。跨模型、任务与配置的大量实验表明,EasyBalance持续加速分布式MoE推理,显著降低GPU空闲时间,多数情况超过40%。代码已开源:https://github.com/yize-wu/EasyInfra。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Load Balancing has emerged as a critical problem in expert-parallel distributed inference of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. As routing distributions are typically skewed across experts, devices hosting lighter-loaded experts must idle to wait for the heaviest during expert computing, leading to inefficiency. Existing load-balancing approaches primarily rely on expert replication or migration within each layer, which introduce additional overhead and limit their flexibility and scalability. To address this problem, we propose EasyBalance, a cross-layer load balancing strategy that requires no modifications to the expert-device mapping, enabling instant adaptability and incurring essentially no additional overhead. Our key insights are that (1) experts of other layers can be viewed as naturally redundant for the current layer, and (2) cross-layer MoE workloads can be jointly executed to mitigate their individual imbalance. Based on these observations, EasyBalance greedily schedules a subset of cross-layer workloads to run at each MoE step and defers the remaining workloads for future balancing opportunities, effectively leveraging cross-layer imbalance mitigation. Extensive experiments across models, tasks, and configurations demonstrate that EasyBalance consistently accelerates distributed MoE inference, reducing GPU idling by mostly over 40%. Code is available at https://github.com/yize-wu/EasyInfra.
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