FlexLLM: A System for Co-Serving Large Language Model Inference and Parameter-Efficient Finetuning
Abstract
Finetuning large language models (LLMs) is essential for task adaptation, yet serving stacks today isolate inference and finetuning on separate GPU clusters – wasting resources and under-utilizing hardware. We introduce FlexLLM, the first system to co-serve LLM inference and PEFT-based finetuning on shared GPUs by fusing computation at the token level. The static compilation optimizations in FlexLLM – dependent parallelization and graph pruning significantly shrink activation memory, leading to end-to-end GPU memory savings by up to 80%. At runtime, a novel token-level finetuning mechanism paired with a hybrid token scheduler dynamically interleaves inference and training tokens within each co-serving iteration, meeting strict latency SLOs while maximizing utilization. In end-to-end benchmarks on LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-14B, and Qwen-2.5-32B, FlexLLM sustains the inference SLO requirements up to 20 req/s, and improves finetuning throughput by 1.9-4.8x under heavy inference workloads and 2.5-6.8x under light loads, preserving over 76% of peak finetuning progress even at peak demand. The source code of FlexLLM is publicly available at https://github.com/flexflow/FlexFlow/.
