Efficient Batch and Interactive LLM Inference at Scale with llm-d
As organizations deploy AI applications in production, their inference infrastructure must serve two fundamentally different workloads simultaneously: interactive requests requiring immediate replies, and batch inference jobs that process thousands of requests with a time tolerance of hours for receiving results. Use cases for batch inference include autonomous background agents performing multi-step reasoning and deep research, as well as user-initiated workloads like offline evaluations, dataset processing, and embedding generation.
In batch inference, the goal is to maximize throughput across a large volume of requests while meeting defined completion time targets, without interfering with interactive traffic. Non-urgent inference can fill GPU capacity during periods of lower interactive traffic, increasing infrastructure utilization. Users can also take advantage of differential billing between batch and interactive workloads for cost-optimized processing.
Batch Gateway brings first-class batch inference capabilities to llm-d. It provides an OpenAI-compatible API for submitting, tracking, and managing large-scale batch jobs, running efficiently alongside interactive inference workloads on shared infrastructure. With OpenAI API compatibility, users can migrate existing OpenAI batch scripts with minimal changes.
