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Abstract:Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale large language models (LLMs) to hundreds of billions of parameters. Serving a single MoE model requires multiple GPUs operating in parallel, typically through tensor parallelism (TP) or expert parallelism (EP). The optimal choice depends on the number of in-flight requests: TP is faster at low concurrency, whereas EP wins at high concurrency. Production workloads cross this boundary continually: online serving sees bursty arrivals that subside into quiet periods, and reinforcement-learning rollouts begin as a high-concurrency burst that decays into a long tail of stragglers. Pinning either layout therefore forfeits performance when the workload crosses to the other side.
We present Moebius, a serving system that switches between EP and TP at runtime without restarting the engine or dropping in-flight requests. Our key insight is that EP and TP are two layouts of one model, not two models: they compute the same function over byte-identical expert weights and KV cache, so a switch changes only which rank owns each slice. Moving those owner-changed slices is the sole irreducible cost, and modern high-bandwidth GPU interconnects make it fast enough to do between decode steps without draining in-flight requests. Moebius preserves each parallelism's runtime resident, and reshards the single copy of expert weights and KV cache at fixed addresses with fused GPU-to-GPU transfer kernels. On 8x H200 GPUs serving Qwen3-235B-A22B, Moebius matches the better static parallelism at every operating point, and beats it on RL rollouts by 1.16-1.25x across steps. Each switch completes in 215-434 ms, and Moebius holds both layouts resident with only 2.4% memory overhead.

Submission history

From: Shaoyu Wang [view email]
[v1] Thu, 25 Jun 2026 05:10:20 UTC (3,392 KB)