Scaling Distributed Inference Engines with Custom Kernel Optimization and Adaptive Batching Strategies
Introduction The demand for real‑time machine‑learning inference has exploded across industries—from recommendation engines that serve millions of users per second to autonomous‑vehicle perception stacks that must make decisions within a few milliseconds. While training pipelines have long benefited from massive GPU clusters and sophisticated graph optimizers, production inference workloads present a different set of challenges: Latency guarantees – Many user‑facing services cannot tolerate more than a few tens of milliseconds of tail latency. Throughput pressure – A single model may need to process thousands of requests per second on a single node, let alone across a fleet. Heterogeneous hardware – Inference services often run on a mix of CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, and even specialized ASICs. Dynamic traffic – Request rates fluctuate dramatically throughout the day, requiring systems that can adapt on‑the‑fly. Two techniques have emerged as decisive levers for meeting these constraints: ...