rInfer: A Generic and High-Performance Framework for Remote Inference with Heterogeneous Accelerators

Inference applications leverage various heterogeneous accelerators, including GPUs, TPUs, and FPGAs, to achieve remarkable performance. Remote inference, which enables applications and accelerators to reside on different nodes, can effectively address low hardware resource utilization and enhance flexibility in resource allocation. However, existing APIremoting solutions face compatibility issues, as they demand extensive development efforts to support diverse heterogeneous accelerators and adapt to rapidly evolving device runtimes. On the other hand, current inference service systems demand cumbersome cross-server configuration and suffer from suboptimal data transmission performance, overlooking data copy overhead in the network stack and not leveraging high-performance RDMA. In this paper, we present rInfer, a generic and highperformance framework for remote inference with heterogeneous accelerators. The key idea of rInfer is to abstract the entire remote inference process and optimize network transmission. On the client node, rInfer offers users an inference-oriented rInfer Device and an ease-of-use rInfer programming model, shielding users from the complexities of server configuration and network communication. On the server node, rInfer integrates with diverse inference frameworks, such as TensorRT and Torch, ensuring high compatibility with various accelerators. Furthermore, we optimize network data transmission by eliminating the need for serialization and deserialization in Protobuf to minimize data copying and adopt RDMA to enhance data transfer efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that rInfer achieves performance nearly equivalent to local execution for the BERT model, with only a minor difference of 1.5 %. Compared to TorchServe, rInfer-TCP achieves a 51.6 % reduction in execution time for the ResNet models and consumes 37.3% less CPU and 61.2% less memory bandwidth on the server node.