EFA
A network interface introduced by AWS for high-performance computing and distributed training. It supports kernel-bypassing RDMA-style peer-to-peer communication and GPUDirect, enabling high-bandwidth, low-latency data transfer between nodes, and is commonly used for cross-node communication in distributed AI training and inference.
Timeline (last 90 days)
On Amazon EC2 P5en instances with EFA networking, Qwen3-32B achieved up to a 1.6x improvement in TTFT.
On Amazon EC2 P5en instances with EFA networking, GLM-5-FP8 achieved up to a 3.3x improvement in TTFT.
EFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter) is a high-performance network interface provided by AWS for EC2 instances that lets applications access network hardware directly through an OS bypass mechanism, significantly reducing latency and improving bandwidth utilization, while also supporting the SRD protocol for multipath transmission.
If a team is already deploying vLLM with PD disaggregation, bidirectional KV transfer is a natural upgrade; if it is still deploying on a single node, it needs to consider the network dependency introduced by cross-node transfer, because high-speed interconnects like EFA are not available in all environments.
vLLM's bidirectional KV transfer requires no additional hardware, and can be implemented with a KV-cache-aware router and EFA-based point-to-point tensor transmission.
All Facts (5)
On Amazon EC2 P5en instances with EFA networking, Qwen3-32B achieved up to a 1.6x improvement in TTFT.
50%UnverifiedOn Amazon EC2 P5en instances with EFA networking, GLM-5-FP8 achieved up to a 3.3x improvement in TTFT.
50%UnverifiedEFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter) is a high-performance network interface provided by AWS for EC2 instances that lets applications access network hardware directly through an OS bypass mechanism, significantly reducing latency and improving bandwidth utilization, while also supporting the SRD protocol for multipath transmission.
50%UnverifiedIf a team is already deploying vLLM with PD disaggregation, bidirectional KV transfer is a natural upgrade; if it is still deploying on a single node, it needs to consider the network dependency introduced by cross-node transfer, because high-speed interconnects like EFA are not available in all environments.
50%UnverifiedvLLM's bidirectional KV transfer requires no additional hardware, and can be implemented with a KV-cache-aware router and EFA-based point-to-point tensor transmission.
50%