LLM Checkpoint/Restore I/O Optimization
Analysis
Key Takeaways
- •Checkpoint/restore is a major I/O bottleneck in LLM training and inference.
- •Kernel-accelerated I/O libraries like liburing can improve performance.
- •Aggregation and coalescing strategies are crucial for optimizing I/O.
- •The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing LLM checkpointing engines.
“The paper finds that uncoalesced small-buffer operations significantly reduce throughput, while file system-aware aggregation restores bandwidth and reduces metadata overhead. Their approach achieves up to 3.9x and 7.6x higher write throughput compared to existing LLM checkpointing engines.”