Prism: Cost-Efficient Multi-LLM Serving via GPU Memory Ballooning
Shan Yu, Yifan Qiao, Mingyuan Ma, Yangmin Li, Shuo Yang, Xinyuan Tong, Yang Wang, Zhiqiang Xie, Yuwei An, Shiyi Cao, Ke Bao, Deepak Vij
Abstract
Inference providers must maintain availability for many LLMs, including low-volume but essential models, making resource efficiency increasingly important as token prices fall. Analysis of production traces reveals a dynamic bursty-group pattern in which sets of models become active together and shift over time; existing space- and time-sharing approaches lack principled mechanisms to adapt to this variability, forcing trade-offs between SLO adherence and efficiency. We observe that elastic memory allocation can unify spatial and temporal sharing. Based on this insight, we have developed Prism, a memory-centric LLM co-serving framework that applies memory ballooning to reclaim memory across models and support both forms of sharing under a single scheme. Prism’s balloon driver, referred to as kvcached , has been open-sourced at https://github.com/ovg-project/kvcached , and deployed in production environments across 10K+ GPUs.
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