Mooncake

<div align="center"> <img src=image/mooncake-icon.png width=44% /> <h2 align="center"> A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving </h2> <a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/fast25-qin.pdf" target="_blank"><strong>Paper</strong></a> | <a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/fast25_slides-qin.pdf" target="_blank"><strong>Slides</strong></a> | <a href="FAST25-release/traces" target="_blank"><strong>Traces</strong></a> | <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00079" target="_blank"><strong>Technical Report</strong></a> | <a href="https://kvcache-ai.github.io/Mooncake/" target="_blank"><strong>Blog</strong></a> | <a href="https://join.slack.com/t/mooncake-project/shared_invite/zt-3qx4x35ea-zSSTqTHItHJs9SCoXLOSPA" target="_blank"><strong>Slack</strong></a> <br /> <br />

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Mooncake is the serving platform for <a href="https://kimi.ai/"><img src="image/kimi.png" alt="icon" style="height: 16px; vertical-align: middle;"> Kimi</a>, a leading LLM service provided by <a href="https://www.moonshot.cn/"><img src="image/moonshot.jpg" alt="icon" style="height: 16px; vertical-align: middle;"> Moonshot AI</a>. Now both the Transfer Engine and Mooncake Store are open-sourced! This repository also hosts its technical report and the open-sourced traces.

<h2 id="updates">🔄 Updates</h2>

• Mar 19, 2026: TorchSpec: Speculative Decoding Training at Scale is open sourced, using Mooncake to decouple inference and training via efficient hidden states management.
• Mar 5, 2026: LightX2V now supports disaggregated deployment based on Mooncake, enabling encoder/transformer service decoupling with Mooncake Transfer Engine for high-performance cross-device and cross-machine data transfer.
• Feb 25, 2026: SGLang merged Encoder Global Cache Manager, introducing a Mooncake-powered global multimodal embedding cache that enables cross-instance sharing of ViT embeddings to avoid redundant GPU computation.
• Feb 24, 2026: vLLM-Omni introduces disaggregated inference connectors with support for both MooncakeStoreConnector and MooncakeTransferEngineConnector for multi-node omni-modality pipelines.
• Feb 12, 2026: Mooncake Joins PyTorch Ecosystem We are thrilled to announce that Mooncake has officially joined the PyTorch Ecosystem!
• Jan 28, 2026: FlexKV, a distributed KV store and cache system from Tencent and NVIDIA in collaboration with the community, now supports distributed KVCache reuse with the Mooncake Transfer Engine.
• Dec 27, 2025: Collaboration with ROLL! Check out the paper here.
• Dec 23, 2025: SGLang introduces Encode-Prefill-Decode (EPD) Disaggregation with Mooncake as a transfer backend. This integration allows decoupling compute-intensive multimodal encoders (e.g., Vision Transformers) from language model nodes, utilizing Mooncake's RDMA engine for zero-copy transfer of large multimodal embeddings.
• Dec 19, 2025: Mooncake Transfer Engine has been integrated into TensorRT LLM for KVCache transfer in PD-disaggregated inference.
• Dec 19, 2025: Mooncake Transfer Engine has been directly integrated into vLLM v1 as a KV Connector in PD-disaggregated setups.
• Nov 07, 2025: RBG + SGLang HiCache + Mooncake, a role-based out-of-the-box solution for cloud native deployment, which is elastic, scalable, and high-performance.
• Sept 18, 2025: Mooncake Store empowers vLLM Ascend by serving as the distributed KV cache pool backend.
• Sept 10, 2025: SGLang officially supports Mooncake Store as a hierarchical KV caching storage backend. The integration extends RadixAttention with multi-tier KV cache storage across device, host, and remote storage layers.
• Sept 10, 2025: The official & high-performance version of Mooncake P2P Store is open-sourced as checkpoint-engine. It has been successfully applied in K1.5 and K2 production training, updating Kimi-K2 model (1T parameters) across thousands of GPUs in ~20s.
• Aug 23, 2025: xLLM high-performance inference engine builds hybrid KV cache management based on Mooncake, supporting global KV cache management with intelligent offloading and prefetching.
• Aug 18, 2025: vLLM-Ascend integrates Mooncake Transfer Engine for KV cache register and disaggregate prefill, enabling efficient distributed inference on Ascend NPUs.
• Jul 20, 2025: Mooncake powers the deployment of Kimi K2 on 128 H200 GPUs with PD disaggregation and large-scale expert parallelism, achieving 224k tokens/sec prefill throughput and 288k tokens/sec decode throughput.
• Jun 20, 2025: Mooncake becomes a PD disaggregation backend for LMDeploy.
• May 9, 2025: NIXL officially supports Mooncake Transfer Engine as a backend plugin.
• May 8, 2025: Mooncake x LMCache unite to pioneer KVCache-centric LLM serving system.
• May 5, 2025: Supported by Mooncake Team, SGLang release <a href="https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/" target="_blank">guidance</a> to deploy DeepSeek with PD Disaggregation on 96 H100 GPUs.
• Apr 22, 2025: LMCache officially supports Mooncake Store as a <a href="https://blog.lmcache.ai/2025-04-22-tencent/" target="_blank">remote connector</a>.
• Apr 10, 2025: SGLang officially supports Mooncake Transfer Engine for disaggregated prefilling and KV cache transfer.
• Mar 7, 2025: We open-sourced the Mooncake Store, a distributed KVCache based on Transfer Engine. vLLM's xPyD disaggregated prefilling & decoding based on Mooncake Store will be released soon.
• Feb 25, 2025: Mooncake receives the Best Paper Award at FAST 2025!
• Feb 21, 2025: The updated <a href="FAST25-release/traces" target="_blank">traces</a> used in our FAST'25 paper have been released.
• Dec 16, 2024: vLLM officially supports Mooncake Transfer Engine for disaggregated prefilling and KV cache transfer.
• Nov 28, 2024: We open-sourced the Transfer Engine, the central component of Mooncake. We also provide two demonstrations of Transfer Engine: a P2P Store and vLLM integration.
• July 9, 2024: We open-sourced the trace as a <a href="https://github.com/kvcache-ai/Mooncake/blob/main/FAST25-release/arxiv-trace/mooncake_trace.jsonl" target="_blank">JSONL file</a>.
• June 27, 2024: We present a series of Chinese blogs with more discussions on <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/705754254">zhihu 1</a>, <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/705910725">2</a>, <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/706204757">3</a>, <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/707997501">4</a>, <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/9461861451">5</a>, <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/1939988652114580803">6</a>, <a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/1959366095443064318">7</a>.
• June 26, 2024: Initial technical report release.

<h2 id="overview">🎉 Overview</h2>

Mooncake features a KVCache-centric disaggregated architecture that separates the prefill and decoding clusters. It also leverages the underutilized CPU, DRAM, and SSD resources of the GPU cluster to implement a disaggregated KVCache pool.

The core of Mooncake is its KVCache-centric scheduler, which balances maximizing