ShardMeter: Sharded and Geo-Distributed Training Without the Guesswork

Training large-scale AI models often outgrows a single data center, demanding sharded, multi-cluster, and decentralized training. However, the huge space of resource allocations makes exhaustive benchmarking and manual tuning impractical, while performance depends on tightly coupled factors like model size, GPU memory, batch size, bandwidth, and sharding strategy. We introduce ShardMeter, a lightweight analytical performance model that predicts the end-to-end runtime of transformer-based workloads across arbitrary sharded, distributed, and even decentralized training. Given a model's characteristics and a target hardware topology, ShardMeter estimates per-GPU and per-island throughput, training cost, total wall-clock time, and identifies performance bottlenecks. Our analysis reveals diminishing-return regimes as island size increases, quantifies transitions between compute- and communication-bound scaling, evaluates hyperparameter trade-offs, and models cost-throughput for large-scale decentralized training. ShardMeter exposes these insights to quickly explore the configuration space, choose near-optimal deployment plans, and avoid costly trial and error.

ScaleSense: Cost-Intelligent Scaling Framework via Learned Resource Estimation in Alibaba AnalyticDB

Cloud-native serverless data warehouses achieve fine-grained elasticity by decoupling storage from compute, yet determining the optimal resource allocation for highly heterogeneous ad-hoc queries remains a formidable industrial challenge. Our analysis of production workloads in Alibaba AnalyticDB exposes a costly ``provisioning trap'': the fear of catastrophic resource depletion drives users to blindly over-provision resources, wasting immense monetary budgets without alleviating non-CPU bottlenecks (e.g., I/O saturation). To break this impasse, we propose ScaleSense, a proactive, query-level resource scaling framework. Specifically, it features a multi-faceted query encoder that jointly models plan topologies and hardware specifications. Crucially, a quantile-based resource predictor estimates multi-dimensional physical footprints, acting as a reliable safety net for optimal resource scaling. An auto-scaling controller then navigates the performance-cost Pareto frontier, dynamically tailoring allocations to specific business priorities without requiring model retraining. Evaluations on over 1.36 million production queries show that ScaleSense achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy with good prediction interval coverage. By achieving a 76.7% relative improvement in optimal resource configuration selection over the best baseline, this approach addresses the critical performance-cost trade-off while maintaining low-overhead inference latency, confirming its practical performance in production deployments. Under the performance-optimization policy, ScaleSense satisfies user-defined performance requirements while reducing monetary cost by up to 5.22x.

Cache-Aware Prompt Compression:A Two-Tier Cost Model for LLM API Caching

Production LLM deployments combine two cost-reduction primitives: prompt caching (a discounted rate for re-used token prefixes) and prompt compression (fewer tokens sent). The compression literature has standardized on query-aware methods that produce a different compressed prefix per query, mechanically invalidating the prefix-strict cache on every call. We characterize this cost empirically on Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6 API and find caching is far from the rho=1.0 ideal the literature assumes: Sonnet's cache has a two-tier architecture with a sharp threshold near 3,500 tokens, below which the hit rate plateaus at rho~0.83 across 30-call sessions. Our cost model predicts, and experiments confirm, that under realistic rho, query-aware compression beats naive caching at high compression ratios (r>=6). We propose Cache-Aware Prompt Compression (CAPC), pairing query-agnostic compression with explicit cache_control plus a tier-preserving ratio bound that prevents over-compression from pushing the cached prefix into the hot tier. CAPC is the cheapest strategy in 16/16 configurations on LongBench-v2, with mean savings of 49% over cache-only, 64% over query-aware compression, and 90% over vanilla, at quality within 0.05 of the uncompressed baseline. We validate CAPC on three production workloads: an enterprise tool-using assistant with a 94k-token schema prefix (51.7% cost reduction at r=3); a graphify knowledge-graph RAG pipeline across two codebases (9.3x vs cache-all on FastAPI, 2.4x on httpx); and the public tau-bench retail benchmark (50 tasks), where CAPC is the cheapest of four strategies with reward exactly equal to vanilla (both 36/50, p=1.00) while query-aware compression is the most expensive at +40.1% over vanilla -- the first production confirmation of the crossover model's negative-ROI prediction on a public benchmark.

An Auto-Scaling Approach for Serverless Environments Based on a Multi-Expert Consensus Mechanism

Serverless computing provides automatic resource management and pay-per-use execution, but effective autoscaling remains challenging because of dynamic workloads, cold-start latency, and dependencies among functions. We present a dependency-aware autoscaling framework that integrates graph-based bottleneck identification, short-term workload forecasting, multi-model consensus, and cost-aware scaling control. Serverless applications are represented as directed dependency graphs, and structurally important functions are identified using weighted degree centrality. Resource demand is predicted using lightweight MLP, LSTM, and CNN models. Their outputs are combined through a performance-weighted probabilistic ensemble inspired by Bayesian model averaging. The controller further incorporates cold-start awareness and cost comparison to select among scale-up, scale-down, and hold actions. Experiments using real workload traces show that supervised forecasting substantially outperforms unsupervised clustering for autoscaling decision generation. The proposed ensemble achieves 99.88 percent prediction accuracy and reduces prediction error compared with representative hybrid forecasting methods. Evaluations across multiple cloud pricing models also demonstrate consistent infrastructure cost reductions while maintaining performance targets. The results show that combining dependency analysis, multi-expert forecasting, and cost-aware control provides a robust and practical solution for serverless autoscaling.

CLOUDADV: Decision-Aligned Instance Sizing with Zero-Shot Foundation Models under Drift

Cloud virtual machines are often overprovisioned, creating avoidable cost and operational inefficiency. We present CLOUDADV, an interactive engineer-facing advisory system for cloud instance sizing under workload drift. The system combines zero-shot time-series forecasting with bounded recommendation generation across day-, week-, and month-scale planning horizons. For each query, CLOUDADV constructs a structured decision context from historical utilization, forecast summaries, current VM metadata, candidate instance options, pricing, and explicit sizing heuristics. A higher-capacity LLM is used offline to generate reference recommendations, while a smaller production model is evaluated on the same prompts to assess deployment-time alignment under latency and cost constraints. Evaluation prioritizes downstream recommendation quality using simulated Azure cost savings and ex-post exceedance, with rolling-origin forecast accuracy reported as a secondary diagnostic against classical and supervised baselines. In a case study of seven production VMs, the reference recommendations reduce simulated monthly cost from about \$1,503 to \$708, yielding \$795/month in savings (52.9%) under conservative heuristic constraints, while the highest observed exceedance rate among downgraded cases is 1.5%. Although Chronos-2 does not minimize every forecasting metric, it often induces recommendation patterns similar to those of a supervised per-VM baseline. These results suggest that zero-shot foundation models can support decision-aligned provisioning in non-stationary cloud environments while reducing the operational burden of repeated per-tenant retraining, revalidation, and redeployment.

Cluster, Route, Escalate: Cascaded Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Serving

Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) in production forces a trade-off between accuracy and cost. Operators often default to a single model that is either expensive for easy queries or insufficient for hard ones. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage cascaded solution. Stage 1 clusters incoming queries and assigns each cluster to its most cost-effective model. The cost budget for this routing process is set by an interpretable hyperparameter, tuned offline. Stage 2 adds a quality estimation (QE) cascade; when an output from Stage 1 is judged low-quality, the query is escalated to a stronger model. This ensures only hard or low-confidence cases reach the expensive models. On the test datasets, the cascaded system retains 97-99% of the strongest model's accuracy while reducing Time Per Output Token (TPOT). It requires only task-correctness labels and adapts to changes in the model pool without manual reconfiguration.