HELIX: HEterogeneous LLM Inference with FleXible and Fine-Grained Partitioning

Victoria Clerico, William Simon, Corey Liam Lammie, Orhun Görkem, Athanasios Vasilopoulos +4

LLM inference is inherently heterogeneous, with performance bottlenecks shifting throughout inference phases down to individual operators. This has motivated heterogeneous serving systems that disaggregate execution across specialized accelerators, typically through fixed partitions such as prefill/decode or attention/FFN. However, these approaches commit to a partitioning strategy in advance, limiting their ability to adapt to different workloads and model architectures while forcing emerging accelerators into predefined roles. We present HELIX, a vLLM-based software stack that discovers, compiles and dispatches workload-aware partitions across heterogeneous accelerators at the operator granularity. At engine initialization, HELIX automatically determines hardware-specific operator placements that minimize execution latency, accounting for profiled execution costs, communication overheads, device capabilities, and memory constraints. It combines dynamic programming, piecewise compilation, and heterogeneous subgraph dispatch, enabling accelerators with partial operator coverage to participate in LLM inference without predefined model partitions. HELIX provides an open-source…