DeepPiC: xPU-PIM Cluster Architecture with Adaptive Resource-Aware Task Orchestration for DeepSeek-Style MoE Inference

The success of DeepSeek has driven demand for deploying high-performance inference clusters. However, due to its Transformer-based autoregressive structure, DeepSeek remains severely bandwidth-bound, limiting the scalability of traditional xPU (e.g., GPU/TPU). While DRAM-based processing-inmemory (PIM) offers a promising solution to overcome memory bottlenecks, its use in inference clusters for DeepSeek remains underexplored due to three challenges: (1) non-trivial inter-device communication overhead; (2) the need for expert parallelism in the mixture-of-experts (MoE) module; and (3) lack of efficient task offloading to PIM. To this end, we propose DeepPiC, a novel xPU-PIM cluster architecture designed for DeepSeek-style models with multi-latent attention (MLA) and MoE modules. DeepPiC introduces a heterogeneous xPU+HBM-PIM device to accelerate low arithmetic intensity operations. It can seamlessly replace conventional xPU devices without any modification to clusterlevel interconnect topology. However, DeepPiC cannot fully realize its performance potential under static scheduling, which fails to adapt to shifting compute and memory demands driven by multidimensional variability (model heterogeneity, cluster-scale volatility, runtime dynamics). This induces inter-device communication overhead and intra-device underutilization. Thus, we propose Adaptive Resource-Aware Task Orchestration (ARTO), a two-phase strategy that decouples global model partitioning from local task assignment by dynamically coordinating (1) crossdevice parallelism optimization and (2) intra-device xPU/PIM mapping. Evaluated on DeepSeek V3-671B using H20-, A100-, and $\mathbf{H 2 0 0}$-Cluster ($\mathbf{H 2 0}$ serves as a compute-limited alternative to high-end GPUs), DeepPiC (H20+HBM-PIM) achieves up to $\mathbf{3} \times \mathbf{, 2} \times$ and $\mathbf{1. 3} \times$ speedup over $\mathbf{H 2 0}$-, A100-, and $\mathbf{H 2 0 0}$-Cluster at small batch sizes, while maintaining $\mathbf{7 4 \%}$ and $\mathbf{5 4 \%}$ of A100and $\mathbf{H 2 0 0}$-Cluster performance at large batch sizes. These results demonstrate that DeepPiC enables low-end xPU to approach or even exceed premium ones by fundamentally overcoming memory bottlenecks via adaptive scheduling that orchestrates PIM and xPU heterogeneous resources.