Scaling Heterogeneous Inference Clusters for Low Latency Multi‑Modal Foundation Model Deployment
Introduction Foundation models—large, pre‑trained neural networks that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks—have exploded in popularity across vision, language, audio, and multimodal domains. Their sheer size (often hundreds of billions of parameters) and the need to process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., text + image + audio) make low‑latency inference a formidable engineering challenge. Enter heterogeneous inference clusters: collections of compute nodes that differ in CPU, GPU, accelerator, memory, and networking capabilities. By intelligently orchestrating these diverse resources, organizations can meet strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) while controlling cost. ...