Toward Sustainable Distributed LLM Inference: A Systems Synthesis and Research Agenda for an Energy-, Carbon-, and Cache-Aware llm-d Control Plane

Large language model (LLM) sustainability is increasingly a serving-systems problem, not only a training problem. In production, energy and carbon impact depend on more than model size: workload shape, batching, key-value (KV) cache reuse, prefill/decode placement, model and accelerator choice, powe