Accessible and Portable LLM Inference by Compiling Computational Graphs into SQL

Serving large language models (LLMs) often demands specialized hardware, dedicated frameworks, and substantial development efforts, which restrict their accessibility, especially for edge devices and organizations with limited technical resources. We propose a novel compiler that translates LLM inference graphs into SQL queries, enabling relational databases, one of the most widely used and mature software systems globally, to serve as the runtime. By mapping neural operators such as matrix multiplication and attention into relational primitives like joins and aggregations, our approach leverages database capabilities, including disk-based data management and native caching. Supporting key transformer components, such as attention mechanisms and key-value caching, our system generates SQL pipelines for end-to-end LLM inference. Using the Llama3 family as a case study, we demonstrate up to 30x speedup in token generation for memory-constrained scenarios comparable to competitive CPU-based frameworks. Our work offers an accessible, portable, and efficient solution, facilitating the serving of LLMs across diverse deployment environments.