One-Sided Expert-Parallel All-to-All for Mixture-of-Experts Inference over NVLink

arXiv:2611.13188v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expert parallelism (EP) shards the experts of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layer across GPUs, so every MoE layer requires two all-to-all communications, namely dispatch and combine. Compared with training, inference processes relatively few tokens per GPU at a time, and at small batch sizes fixed costs that do not grow with the number of tokens, rather than data movement, dominate the latency. We present NVLinkOneSided, a one-sided EP all-to-all for GPUs within a single NVLink domain. Each source rank pushes its tokens, without first exchanging metadata, into rank-major buffers on the target GPUs, and the grouped GEMMs read them in place instead of from a per-expert copy. We provide two protocols for the synchronization that the communication requires, namely Fence and Sentinel, for high-throughput and low-latency scenarios respectively. On Blackwell GPUs, NVLinkOneSided completes dispatch and combine 1.2-3.0$\times$ faster than DeepEP, with the largest speedups at small batch sizes. The resulting MoE layer is up to 2.4$\times$ faster than DeepEP with DeepGEMM. It even outperforms the fused DeepGEMM MegaMoE at up to 128 tokens per GPU, making it still competitive for decoding. We expose NVLinkOneSided through a modular interface, so that it is agnostic to the activation quantization format, decoupled from the MoE compute backend and easy to integrate into inference frameworks.