GeoServe: Leveraging Disaggregated Data Processing for Scalable Geospatial Model Serving

Identifier:  imarina:9586094

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/imarina9586094

Authors:  Gerard Finol; Christian Pinto

Abstract:
Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) operate on large, multi-band raster products (e.g., GeoTIFF) that require expensive data access and preprocessing - reprojection, decoding, normalization, and tiling - before GPU inference. In our measurements, reading and preprocessing geospatial inputs can be orders of magnitude slower than tokenization or standard image preprocessing, and constitute 31 - 43% of end-to-end request time for a representative GFM. Existing inference frameworks such as vLLM execute this preprocessing inline with request handling, which under load serializes CPU and I/O work, increasing queueing delay, and leaving GPUs underutilized. We present GeoServe, a Ray-based serving system that decouples the geospatial data pipeline from GPU inference by disaggregating I/O- and CPU-heavy preprocessing to a scalable pool of CPU workers, while keeping GPU nodes dedicated to model forward passes. We show experimentally that GeoServe reduces the p90 request latency by up to 414.9× at high load and improves throughput by up to 4.74× compared to vanilla vLLM, while increasing the achieved model forward-pass rate from ~ 16 inf./sec to ~ 72 inf./sec via better batching opportunities.