Topic

Agentic Workloads

All digests tagged Agentic Workloads

How H-Company Optimizes VLM Serving for Computer Use Agents With NVIDIA Dynamo thumbnail

· 37:32

How H-Company Optimizes VLM Serving for Computer Use Agents With NVIDIA Dynamo

This session details how H-Company, a startup building computer-use agents, optimizes the serving of Vision Language Models (VLMs) using NVIDIA Dynamo. Computer-use agents, which can read screens and interact with desktop/web/mobile applications, present unique serving challenges compared to traditional chatbots due to the inclusion of screenshots and large context windows. The solution leverages Dynamo components—including the embedding cache, EP endpoint picker, and Model Express—to manage complex workloads, improve throughput, and enable faster autoscaling.

Key takeaways

  1. Computer-Use Agents (Holo/HoloTron) 2:30

    These agents go beyond text generation; they can read a screen and perform actions (clicking, typing) across real desktop, web, and mobile applications. H-Company's models, Holo and Holotron, are built by post-training open-source models (like Quen and Neotron) for these specific tasks.

  2. The Challenge of VLM Serving 5:30

    Unlike standard chat models, computer-use agents require passing screenshots, which significantly increases the context size (potentially 1-4k tokens per image). Furthermore, the history of screenshots (sliding window) invalidates the cache at each turn, requiring re-computation of the VLM.

  3. Dynamo's Role in Optimization 6:40

    NVIDIA Dynamo is used to address these scaling challenges by providing components for efficient request routing, caching, and model deployment, enabling production-scale service of these complex agentic workloads.

  4. Model Express for Fast Bootup 21:40

    Model Express is a Dynamo component that significantly speeds up VLM replica bootup (7x to 12x speedup). It uses NVIDIA GPU-to-GPU LDMA capability to pull weights directly from other replicas on the cluster, improving autoscaling speed and resource utilization.

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KV Cache-Aware Routing and P/D Disaggregation on Kubernetes — Yuchen Fama & Ashish Kamra, Red Hat thumbnail

· 21:48

KV Cache-Aware Routing and P/D Disaggregation on Kubernetes — Yuchen Fama & Ashish Kamra, Red Hat

This talk details advanced strategies for optimizing LLM inference in complex agentic workloads, moving beyond the limitations of steady-state public benchmarks. The focus is on two critical levers: KV Cache-Aware Routing and Prefill/Decode (P/D) Disaggregation. Implementing these techniques—using frameworks like LLMD—significantly improves latency and throughput by managing volatile cache usage and separating compute-bound prefill from memory-bandwidth-hungry decode phases, particularly in the middle concurrency band.

Key takeaways

  1. Agentic Workloads vs. Benchmarks 5:29

    Real-world agentic workloads exhibit chaotic multi-turn interactions (up to 3,000 turns) with high cache hit rates (>90%) and massive input/output ratios (often >100:1), which standard public benchmarks fail to capture [0:00], [3:29].

  2. KV Cache Routing Optimization 10:28

    Implementing KV cache-aware routing (via Endpoint Picker) is a cost-effective optimization, as the token cost difference between cached and uncached tokens can be as high as 10x [5:12]. This helps solve Time to First Token (TTFT) issues.

  3. P/D Disaggregation Benefits 15:28

    Separating prefill and decode into independent, scalable pods prevents 'phase interference'—where a long prefill stalls token generation (decode)—leading to drastically reduced P99 Inter Token Latency (ITL) from ~900ms down to ~100ms [9:28], [10:46].

  4. Prerequisites for PD 17:26

    Effective P/D disaggregation requires an advanced, high-speed network fabric like RDMA or RoCE to facilitate the transfer of KV caches between prefill and decode workers [10:46]. If such a fabric is unavailable, aggregated serving may be preferable.

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