{"ID":2847807,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00321","arxiv_id":"2511.00321","title":"Scalable Processing-Near-Memory for 1M-Token LLM Inference: CXL-Enabled KV-Cache Management Beyond GPU Limits","abstract":"The expansion of context windows in large language models (LLMs) to multi-million tokens introduces severe memory and compute bottlenecks, particularly in managing the growing Key-Value (KV) cache. While Compute Express Link (CXL) enables non-eviction frameworks that offload the full KV-cache to scalable external memory, these frameworks still suffer from costly data transfers when recalling non-resident KV tokens to limited GPU memory as context lengths increase. This work proposes scalable Processing-Near-Memory (PNM) for 1M-Token LLM Inference, a CXL-enabled KV-cache management system that coordinates memory and computation beyond GPU limits. Our design offloads token page selection to a PNM accelerator within CXL memory, eliminating costly recalls and enabling larger GPU batch sizes. We further introduce a hybrid parallelization strategy and a steady-token selection mechanism to enhance compute efficiency and scalability. Implemented atop a state-of-the-art CXL-PNM system, our solution delivers consistent performance gains for LLMs with up to 405B parameters and 1M-token contexts. Our PNM-only offloading scheme (PNM-KV) and GPU-PNM hybrid with steady-token execution (PnG-KV) achieve up to 21.9x throughput improvement, up to 60x lower energy per token, and up to 7.3x better total cost efficiency than the baseline, demonstrating that CXL-enabled multi-PNM architectures can serve as a scalable backbone for future long-context LLM inference.","short_abstract":"The expansion of context windows in large language models (LLMs) to multi-million tokens introduces severe memory and compute bottlenecks, particularly in managing the growing Key-Value (KV) cache. While Compute Express Link (CXL) enables non-eviction frameworks that offload the full KV-cache to scalable external memor...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00321","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00321v1","authors":"[\"Dowon Kim\",\"MinJae Lee\",\"Janghyeon Kim\",\"HyuckSung Kwon\",\"Hyeonggyu Jeong\",\"Sang-Soo Park\",\"Minyong Yoon\",\"Si-Dong Roh\",\"Yongsuk Kwon\",\"Jinin So\",\"Jungwook Choi\"]","published":"2025-10-31T23:50:44Z","proceeding":"cs.AR","tasks":"[\"cs.AR\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}
