FLAME: A Serving System Optimized for Large-Scale Generative Recommendation with Efficiency

Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) models possess greater scaling power compared to traditional deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs), yet they also impose a tremendous increase in computational burden. Measured in FLOPs, a typical GR model's workload sits in $10^9 \sim 10^{11}$ range, roughly four orders of magnitude higher than traditional DLRMs. Delivering accurate results in a few tens of milliseconds while processing billions of such requests per day puts extreme demands on the performance of the online serving system. Therefore, for industry practitioners, the alluring gains of GR models are tempered by the formidable challenge of online deployment at scale in production services. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive solution of online serving system tailored For Large-scale GenerAtive RecoMmendation with Efficiency (FLAME). Specifically, we leveraging CPU-GPU heterogeneous hardware to decouple feature pre-processing and model computation. We encapsulated several memory optimization features as the Proximal Data Accelerator (PDA) module to make full use of limited bandwidth and storage resources, which achieves a 1.9x throughput gain and a 1.7x latency reduction. We implement the Fused Kernel Engine (FKE) module based on the functionality and interface of NVIDIA TensorRT to boost model computation, delivering a speedup ratio of 4.6x-6.1x, throughput gain ratio of 4.7x-6.3x one step further. In addition, we design the Dynamic Stream Orchestrator (DSO) module to coordinate concurrent requests, enhancing the system throughput performance with 1.3x improvement in throughput and 2.3x speed-up under non-uniform distribution of upstream candidates. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our FLAME effectively supports large-scale online deployment of GR models and achieves remarkable improvements in system performance.