FlexGen VS CTranslate2

Compare FlexGen vs CTranslate2 and see what are their differences.

FlexGen

Running large language models like OPT-175B/GPT-3 on a single GPU. Focusing on high-throughput generation. [Moved to: https://github.com/FMInference/FlexGen] (by Ying1123)
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FlexGen CTranslate2
19 13
5,350 2,799
- 9.3%
10.0 8.9
about 1 year ago 2 days ago
Python C++
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

FlexGen

Posts with mentions or reviews of FlexGen. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-16.

CTranslate2

Posts with mentions or reviews of CTranslate2. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-31.
  • Distil-Whisper: distilled version of Whisper that is 6 times faster, 49% smaller
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Oct 2023
    Just a point of clarification - faster-whisper references it but ctranslate2[0] is what's really doing the magic here.

    Ctranslate2 is a sleeper powerhouse project that enables a lot. They should be up front and center and get the credit they deserve.

    [0] - https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2

  • A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2023
    We'd love to move beyond Nvidia.

    The issue (among others) is we achieve the speech recognition performance we do largely thanks to ctranslate2[0]. They've gone on the record saying that they essentially have no interest in ROCm[1].

    Of course with open source anything is possible but we see this as being one of several fundamental issues in supporting AMD GPGPU hardware.

    [0] - https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2

    [1] - https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2/issues/1072

  • AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Oct 2023
    > While I agree that it's much more effort to get things working on AMD cards than it is with Nvidia, I was a bit surprised to see this comment mention Whisper being an example of "5-10x as performant".

    It easily is. See the benchmarks[0] from faster-whisper which uses Ctranslate2. That's 5x faster than OpenAI reference code on a Tesla V100. Needless to say something like a 4080 easily multiplies that.

    > https://www.tomshardware.com/news/whisper-audio-transcriptio... is a good example of Nvidia having no excuses being double the price when it comes to Whisper inference, with 7900XTX being directly comparable with 4080, albeit with higher power draw. To be fair it's not using ROCm but Direct3D 11, but for performance/price arguments sake that detail is not relevant.

    With all due respect to the author of the article this is "my first entry into ML" territory. They talk about a 5-10 second delay, my project can do sub 1 second times[1] even with ancient GPUs thanks to Ctranslate2. I don't have an RTX 4080 but if you look at the performance stats for the closest thing (RTX 4090) the performance numbers are positively bonkers - completely untouchable for anything ROCm based. Same goes for the other projects I linked, lmdeploy does over 100 tokens/s in a single session with LLama2 13b on my RTX 4090 and almost 600 tokens/s across eight simultaneous sessions.

    > EDIT: Also using CTranslate2 as an example is not great as it's actually a good showcase why ROCm is so far behind CUDA: It's all about adapting the tech and getting the popular libraries to support it. Things usually get implemented in CUDA first and then would need additional effort to add ROCm support that projects with low amount of (possibly hobbyist) maintainers might not have available. There's even an issue in CTranslate2 where they clearly state no-one is working to get ROCm supported in the library. ( https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2/issues/1072#issuecomm... )

    I don't understand what you're saying here. It (along with the other projects I linked) are fantastic examples of just how far behind the ROCm ecosystem is. ROCm isn't even on the radar for most of them as your linked issue highlights.

    Things always get implemented in CUDA first (ten years in this space and I've never seen ROCm first) and ROCm users either wait months (minimum) for sub-par performance or never get it at all.

    [0] - https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper#benchmark

    [1] - https://heywillow.io/components/willow-inference-server/#ben...

  • StreamingLLM: Efficient streaming technique enable infinite sequence lengths
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Oct 2023
    Etc.

    Now, what this allows you to do is reuse the attention computed from the previous turns (since the prefix is the same).

    In practice, people often have a system prompt before the conversation history, which (as far a I can tell) makes this technique not applicable (the input prefix will change as soon as the conversation history is long enough that we need to start dropping the oldest turns).

    In such case, what you could do is to cache at least the system prompt. This is also possible with https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2/blob/2203ad5c8baf878a...

  • Faster Whisper Transcription with CTranslate2
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jul 2023
    The original Whisper implementation from OpenAI uses the PyTorch deep learning framework. On the other hand, faster-whisper is implemented using CTranslate2 [1] which is a custom inference engine for Transformer models. So basically it is running the same model but using another backend, which is specifically optimized for inference workloads.

    [1] https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2

  • Explore large language models on any computer with 512MB of RAM
    4 projects | /r/LocalLLaMA | 17 Jun 2023
    FLAN-T5 models generally perform well for their size, but they are encode-decoder models, and they aren't as widely supported for efficient inference. I wanted students to be able to run everything locally on CPU, so I was ideally hoping for something that supported quantization for CPU inference. I explored llama.cpp and GGML, but ultimately landed on ctranslate2 for inference.
  • CTranslate2: An efficient inference engine for Transformer models
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2023
  • [D] Faster Flan-T5 inference
    1 project | /r/MachineLearning | 22 Feb 2023
    You can also check out the CTranslate2 library which supports efficient inference of T5 models, including 8-bit quantization on CPU and GPU. There is a usage example in the documentation.
  • Running large language models like ChatGPT on a single GPU
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2023
  • [P] CTranslate2: an efficient inference engine for Transformer models
    1 project | /r/MachineLearning | 23 May 2022
    If you'd like to learn more, please visit the GitHub repository and feel free to post questions or suggestions about the project!

What are some alternatives?

When comparing FlexGen and CTranslate2 you can also consider the following projects:

text-generation-webui - A Gradio web UI for Large Language Models. Supports transformers, GPTQ, AWQ, EXL2, llama.cpp (GGUF), Llama models.

vllm - A high-throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving engine for LLMs

ggml - Tensor library for machine learning

sentencepiece - Unsupervised text tokenizer for Neural Network-based text generation.

accelerate - 🚀 A simple way to launch, train, and use PyTorch models on almost any device and distributed configuration, automatic mixed precision (including fp8), and easy-to-configure FSDP and DeepSpeed support

OpenNMT-Tutorial - Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tutorial. Data preprocessing, model training, evaluation, and deployment.

rust-bert - Rust native ready-to-use NLP pipelines and transformer-based models (BERT, DistilBERT, GPT2,...)

oneDNN - oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library (oneDNN)

stanford_alpaca - Code and documentation to train Stanford's Alpaca models, and generate the data.

faster-whisper - Faster Whisper transcription with CTranslate2

bitsandbytes - Accessible large language models via k-bit quantization for PyTorch.

primecount - 🚀 Fast prime counting function implementations