Dissecting the Carbon-SLO Tension in Geo-Distributed LLM Serving

Burak Topcu, Musa Cim, Zuhal Ozturk, Mahmut Taylan Kandemir

Large Language Model (LLM) inference is driving a growing share of datacenter carbon emissions. Although carbon-aware scheduling can reduce these emissions in geo-distributed datacenters by exploiting the spatiotemporal variations in grid carbon intensity, the latency-sensitive nature of LLM serving constrains this design space. While prior studies investigate the carbon savings achievable through spatial scheduling, they oversimplify the dynamics of modern inference engines, such as queueing and continuous batching, which strongly shape inference latency. We address this issue by designing and evaluating a latency-centric, geo-distributed inference simulator, calibrated with hardware-grounded latency and power measurements, that reproduces these dynamics and enables the study of carbon savings under strict service-level objectives (SLOs). We then formulate a series of SLO- and carbon-aware schedulers of increasing sophistication, from per-request heuristics to batch-level optimization: (i) a greedy heuristic, (ii) an integer linear programming (ILP)-based scheduler jointly assigning batches of requests, (iii) an iterative ILP-based solution projecting its own assignments back…