The §3.2 cost-vs-benefit math in commits 029821c (MB1 plot +
pd_cost_vs_benefit.png) and abde010 (RESULTS_SUMMARY.md) was wrong.
What was wrong:
I framed PD-disagg's max phase-isolation benefit as "≤ decode duration
of the new request (~50–200 ms)" — implicitly treating the benefit as
per-request and bounded by that request's own decode. The correct
accounting is per-prefill-event across all stalled streams:
benefit_per_prefill = D × T_prefill × (1 − TPOT_baseline/TPOT_during)
≈ D × T_prefill
which follows from the chunked-prefill math (each of L/N chunks slows
D ongoing decode steps from ~10 ms to t ms, summing to D × T_prefill).
Plug MB1 + MB2 numbers in:
prefill size | T_prefill | T_transfer | D=8 benefit | cost/benefit
2k tok | 0.14 s | 8 ms | 1.1 s | 0.7 %
33k tok | 4.5 s | 320 ms | 36 s | 0.9 %
125k tok | 57 s | 1.9 s | 456 s | 0.4 %
On the phase-isolation axis alone, PD-disagg WINS by 100×–250× — the
opposite of what the deleted figure showed.
The actual dominant reason static PD-disagg fails in agentic is the
D-side KV pool capacity wall (figs/f4b_pdsep_kv_wall.png) — p99
single-request KV is 11.5 GiB, per-D-instance pool is 38 GiB, so 4P+4D
halves system decode capacity. Colleague's 4P+4D experiment showed
TTFT p50 62× worse and success rate 99.5% → 52%, driven by pool
overflow + queueing, not by transfer latency.
Changes (all touched files explicitly listed; no `git add -u`):
- figs/pd_cost_vs_benefit.png : DELETED (figure built on wrong math)
- microbench/fresh_setup/plot_mb1.py : drop the pd_cost_vs_benefit
function; keep mb1_interference.png and update its title to note
per-prefill aggregate stall = D × T_prefill (not capped by decode)
- figs/mb1_interference.png : regenerated, no misleading band annotation
- analysis/mb1/README.md : Summary block rewritten ("what MB1 measures";
no more "max benefit = decode duration" claim); §3.2 implications
section replaced with the corrected per-prefill-event table; explicit
⚠ Correction note documents what was wrong
- analysis/mb2/README.md : Summary block + §3.2 implications section
rewritten the same way; ⚠ Correction note links to RESULTS_SUMMARY §4
- RESULTS_SUMMARY.md §4 + §6 : §4 reordered to lead with the D-side
capacity argument (the real failure mode), MB1/MB2 demoted from
"kill-shot for PD-disagg" to "supporting context inputs to a
cost-benefit table that actually favors PD-disagg on this axis";
§6 paper-claims list reordered to remove the wrong "PD-disagg loses
on cost-vs-benefit" claim and replace with the corrected ones
PAPER_OUTLINE.md and MEETING.md were checked and never picked up this
specific wrong claim — they already (correctly) frame §3.2 around the
D-side KV memory wall.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sweep on dash1 GPU 0 → dash2 GPU 0 over 200 Gbps RoCE.
remote_bootstrap_addr=http://172.27.123.142:8998. Same 9-size × 5-rep
config as the 2026-05-27 intra-node run.
Per-size pure_transfer (p50) lines up within 1–3% of the intra-node
numbers across all sizes:
size intra p50 inter p50
512 tok 5.3 ms 5.2 ms
2048 tok 20.6 20.0
8192 tok 83.7 80.9
32k tok 320.9 309.6
64k tok 1895 1734 (bimodal in both)
128k tok 2835 2818 (bimodal in both)
=> Mooncake's batch_transfer_sync_write **does not use NVLink** for
intra-node peers; both paths go through the 200 Gbps RDMA NIC, with
the 200 Gbps NIC (not the GPU interconnect) being the bottleneck. The
~9.7 GB/s steady-state ceiling and the 6+ GiB variance regime are
identical across topologies.
Operational implication for §3.2: PD-disaggregation does not get
cheaper by co-locating P and D on the same node — every routed request
pays the same ~10 GB/s ceiling for KV transfer, no matter where it
lands. Halving the transfer cost cannot be bought back by topology.
Caveat: B's receive_kv events did not log on dash2 — `MB2_LOG_DIR`
env var did not propagate through vLLM's EngineCore subprocess on
the consumer host (cat /proc/$ENGINE_PID/environ is empty on dash2
for that var, but the producer host on dash1 worked). For this run
pure_transfer numbers are from A's send_blocks alone; full rx_total
breakdown is not available, but pure_transfer is the dominant term.
Adds:
- analyze_mb2_send_only.py — analyzer that works from A's send_blocks
alone when B's receive_kv events are absent
- plot_mb2_compare.py — overlay intra vs inter on the same axes
- plot_mb2.py — tolerate the `rows`-less send-only schema
- figs/mb2_transfer_{time,bw}_inter.png — inter-node single-curve
- figs/mb2_transfer_{time,bw}_compare.png — intra vs inter overlay
- analysis/mb2/A_inter_kvboth.jsonl, inter_kvboth_client.json,
inter_kvboth_breakdown.json
- analysis/mb2/README.md — Summary block updated to reference both
paths, dated 2026-05-27 run-log entry appended with the full table
and the topology-independence framing
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lifts the MB2 intra-node results out of commit messages into a single
place the paper can cite. Structure:
Summary — one-line table + headline numbers for §3.2
Setup — exact hardware/software/config
Method — 3-step bench, instrumentation, pair-by-time-window
Results — full per-size table (latest run dated)
Known limitations — kv_both vs strict, serial-only, intra-only,
sanity preamble in the logs
§3.2 implications — transfer/decode ratio table at agentic sizes
Open questions / next runs — inter-node, bandwidth-ceiling
investigation, concurrent transfers,
strict kv_producer/consumer
Reproduction — exact commands
Run log — dated entries; new runs append here
The latest "intra-node" entry references `de164e5` for the raw
artifacts + figures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
