PowerSlider: Exploiting Phase Asymmetry for LLM Serving under Demand Response

Abstract

AI inference clusters are increasingly constrained by instantaneous power, not just energy: grid operators condition new capacity on demand response, imposing time-varying power caps. Existing LLM serving systems optimize a static energy objective or shed fixed priority tiers under load; either way, goodput collapses when the power envelope moves. An LLM pipeline is not a uniform load: compute-bound prefill loses throughput almost linearly with GPU frequency, memory-bound answer decode sustains it down to $0.57\times$ nominal, and reasoning's thinking phase couples KV-cache capacity to scheduling -- so a cap should be steered to where each watt costs the least performance. PowerSlider does so with a new Flex SLO contract that turns bounded user slack into an optimization constraint, prefill--think--answer disaggregation exposing per-stage frequency and KV control, and a Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) online solver re-solving within 7.7 ms of every cap change, backed by a consolidated fail-safe that power-gates drained instances when DVFS bottoms out on static power. On SGLang with production traces, \sys{} sustains 78.3\% online goodput at a 30\% cap reduction versus 47.6\% for the best of five baselines ($1.64\times$), holds latency-critical tails within $1.3\times$ of nominal (baselines: $2.3$--$6\times$, up to $12\times$), and delivers 92\% mean goodput through a replayed CAISO grid-emergency day bottoming at $0.41\times$ (54\% at the trough; every baseline below 7\%).