ArcLight: A Lightweight LLM Inference Architecture for Many-Core CPUs
Yuzhuang Xu, Xu Han Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Yuxuan Li, Wanxiang Che Harbin Institute of Technology
原文摘要
Although existing frameworks for large language model (LLM) inference on CPUs are mature, they fail to fully exploit the computational potential of many-core CPU platforms. Many-core CPUs are widely deployed in web servers and high-end networking devices, and are typically organized into multiple NUMA nodes that group cores and memory. Current frameworks largely overlook the substantial overhead of cross-NUMA memory access, limiting inference scalability and intelligence enabling on such platforms. To address this limitation, we build ArcLight, a lightweight LLM inference architecture designed from the ground up for many-core CPUs. ArcLight integrates efficient memory management and thread scheduling, and introduces finely controlled tensor parallelism to mitigate the cross-node memory access wall. Experimental results show that ArcLight significantly surpasses the performance ceiling of mainstream frameworks, achieving up to 46% higher inference throughput. Moreover, ArcLight maintains compatibility with arbitrary CPU devices. ArcLight is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ArcLight.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表