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@WoosukKwon WoosukKwon commented Jun 23, 2025

This PR implements an initial version of the asynchronous scheduler, similar to the approach described in the NanoFlow paper. The primary goal is to minimize scheduler overhead by overlapping scheduling with model execution. This is achieved by making the scheduler operate one step ahead of the current execution.

Feature Compatibility

Async scheduling is introduced as an experimental feature and can be enabled using the --async-scheduling flag. It has currently only been validated with basic setups and has not yet been tested in the following scenarios:

  • KV connector
  • Data parallel

At this stage, async scheduling does not support:

  • Speculative decoding
  • Structured outputs
  • Pipeline parallelism

Most of these limitations are potentially addressable in future iterations. For example, I believe we can make most speculative decoding methods (such as EAGLE) compatible with async scheduling.

Implementation

To reuse code and minimize disruption, the async scheduler is implemented as a subclass of the existing scheduler. The key addition is an "output placeholder," representing tokens scheduled but not yet generated.

One limitation of the current design is that the scheduler and GPU worker must run in separate processes for parallel execution. This setup causes extra serialization overhead for input/output data (which is unnecessary in single-gpu cases). This may impact performance, especially for multimodal models with large inputs.

Performance

Async scheduling increases throughput by 3-15%. The speedup is more pronounced with smaller models and larger batch sizes. No significant latency improvement is observed for batch size 1 scenarios, as scheduler overhead in those cases is already minimal.

In terms of serving latency, async scheduling generally reduces TPOT but slightly increases TTFT. The TTFT increases because incoming requests must wait for an additional scheduling step before it is actually processed on GPUs. Despite this, the overall end-to-end latency typically gets faster.

image

Signed-off-by: Woosuk Kwon <woosuk.kwon@berkeley.edu>
@mergify mergify bot added the v1 label Jun 23, 2025
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Summary of Changes

Hello @WoosukKwon, I'm Gemini Code Assist1! I'm currently reviewing this pull request and will post my feedback shortly. In the meantime, here's a summary to help you and other reviewers quickly get up to speed!

This pull request introduces a new asynchronous scheduling mechanism to the system. It involves creating a dedicated AsyncScheduler class, making it configurable via new engine arguments and CLI options, and refactoring existing scheduler and model runner components to support its unique operational flow. The changes aim to enable more flexible and potentially optimized request processing by altering how tokens are managed and KV cache blocks are allocated in an asynchronous context.

Highlights

  • New Async Scheduler Implementation: Introduced a new AsyncScheduler class, inheriting from the base Scheduler, specifically designed to handle asynchronous scheduling logic. This includes distinct behaviors for token management and KV cache block allocation.
  • Configurability and CLI Integration: Added an async_scheduling boolean option to SchedulerConfig and EngineArgs, which is also exposed as a command-line argument (--async-scheduling), allowing users to easily enable or disable the new asynchronous scheduling mode.
  • Refactored Scheduler Logic: The base Scheduler class has been refactored to extract common logic into new, overridable methods such as _free_encoder_inputs, update_request, and update_before_output. This modularization enables the AsyncScheduler to implement its specific token and KV cache handling.
  • Modified Token and KV Cache Management: Adjusted how token IDs are appended and KV cache blocks are managed within both the AsyncScheduler and the gpu_model_runner. In async mode, token updates and block caching are handled differently, often in a more deferred or single-token-at-a-time manner.
  • Batching Strategy Adaptation: The multiproc_executor now sets max_concurrent_batches to 2 when asynchronous scheduling is enabled, indicating a tailored batching strategy for this new mode.
  • Temporary Distributed Executor Backend Fix: A temporary # FIXME change was added to vllm/config.py to default the distributed_executor_backend to mp (multiprocessing) when world_size is 1, overriding the previous uni (unified) setting.
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Code Review

This pull request introduces asynchronous scheduling, which is a significant feature. The changes are well-structured, with a new AsyncScheduler and modifications to support it throughout the codebase. The use of a feature flag async_scheduling is a good approach for introducing this functionality.

I've identified a couple of points for improvement:

  1. A FIXME comment in vllm/config.py could use more context.
  2. There appears to be a redundant method call in vllm/v1/core/sched/async_scheduler.py that could lead to inefficiency.

Overall, this is a solid implementation. Addressing these points will improve the code's clarity and correctness.

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@@ -253,7 +261,9 @@ def schedule(self) -> SchedulerOutput:
request,
num_new_tokens,
num_draft_tokens=num_draft_tokens,
num_lookahead_tokens=self.num_lookahead_tokens)
num_lookahead_tokens=self.num_lookahead_tokens,
delay_cache_blocks=self.is_async,
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do we want to preserve this behavior:

4. If an allocated block is already full of tokens, we immediately add it to the Cache Block, so that the block can be reused by other requests in the same batch.
in the asynchronous case?

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@WoosukKwon WoosukKwon Jul 14, 2025

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Good point. In the current version of this PR I make sure that the deduplication in between the same batch happens. Please check out the test_prefix_caching_for_prefill_dedup test.

Signed-off-by: Woosuk Kwon <woosuk.kwon@berkeley.edu>
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mergify bot commented Jun 26, 2025

This pull request has merge conflicts that must be resolved before it can be
merged. Please rebase the PR, @WoosukKwon.

https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/working-with-forks/syncing-a-fork

@mergify mergify bot added the tpu Related to Google TPUs label Jun 30, 2025
WoosukKwon and others added 2 commits July 1, 2025 19:54
Signed-off-by: Woosuk Kwon <woosuk.kwon@berkeley.edu>
@WoosukKwon WoosukKwon marked this pull request as ready for review July 14, 2025 07:18
@WoosukKwon WoosukKwon added the ready ONLY add when PR is ready to merge/full CI is needed label Jul 14, 2025
Signed-off-by: Woosuk Kwon <woosuk.kwon@berkeley.edu>
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Clean! Looks goods! Left on nit otherwise LGTM

if self.speculative_config is not None:
raise ValueError(
"Currently, speculative decoding is not supported with "
"async scheduling.")
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nit: should we be checking for structured output backends here too? I assume those are also incompatible with async scheduling

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IIUC, structured outputs are runtime parameter per request, so it's tricky to detect it when initializing the server. 😅 What about printing a warning msg for now?

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@LucasWilkinson LucasWilkinson Jul 15, 2025

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sorry should have been more clear!; I guess what I meant was: could we check if the server is started with --guided-decoding-backend= set here? (my bad should have looked up what that config name was before commenting, I think this sets StructuredOutputManager.backend; very out of my depth here haha)

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Will we reject requests that use structured output?

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I want to look into this issue and try to make asynchronous scheduling work together with StructuredOutput.

@WoosukKwon WoosukKwon merged commit d4d3094 into main Jul 15, 2025
71 of 72 checks passed
@WoosukKwon WoosukKwon deleted the woosuk/async-sched branch July 15, 2025 06:01
patrickvonplaten pushed a commit to patrickvonplaten/vllm that referenced this pull request Jul 15, 2025
Signed-off-by: Woosuk Kwon <woosuk.kwon@berkeley.edu>
Signed-off-by: Patrick von Platen <patrick.v.platen@gmail.com>
LyrisZhong pushed a commit to LyrisZhong/vllm that referenced this pull request Jul 23, 2025
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avigny pushed a commit to avigny/vllm that referenced this pull request Jul 31, 2025
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x22x22 pushed a commit to x22x22/vllm that referenced this pull request Aug 5, 2025
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Pradyun92 pushed a commit to Pradyun92/vllm that referenced this pull request Aug 6, 2025
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npanpaliya pushed a commit to odh-on-pz/vllm-upstream that referenced this pull request Aug 6, 2025
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jinzhen-lin pushed a commit to jinzhen-lin/vllm that referenced this pull request Aug 9, 2025
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paulpak58 pushed a commit to paulpak58/vllm that referenced this pull request Aug 13, 2025
Signed-off-by: Woosuk Kwon <woosuk.kwon@berkeley.edu>
Signed-off-by: Paul Pak <paulpak58@gmail.com>
taneem-ibrahim pushed a commit to taneem-ibrahim/vllm that referenced this pull request Aug 14, 2025
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diegocastanibm pushed a commit to diegocastanibm/vllm that referenced this pull request Aug 15, 2025
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