model_analyzer VS DeepSpeed

Inference servers essentially turn a model running on CPU and/or GPU hardware into a microservice.

Many of them support the kserve API standard[0] that supports everything from model loading/unloading to (of course) inference requests across models, versions, frameworks, etc.

So in the case of Triton[1] you can have any number of different TensorFlow/torch/tensorrt/onnx/etc models, versions, and variants. You can have one or more Triton instances running on hardware with access to local GPUs (for this example). Then you can put standard REST and or grpc load balancers (or whatever you want) in front of them, hit them via another API, whatever.

Now all your applications need to do to perform inference is do an HTTP POST (or use a client[2]) for model input, Triton runs it on a GPU (or CPU if you want), and you get back whatever the model output is.

Not a sales pitch for Triton but it (like some others) can also do things like dynamic batching with QoS parameters, automated model profiling and performance optimization[3], really granular control over resources, response caching, python middleware for application/biz logic, accelerated media processing with Nvidia DALI, all kinds of stuff.

[0] - https://github.com/kserve/kserve

[1] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server

[2] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/client

[3] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/model_analyzer

DeepSpeed can handle parallelism concerns, and even offload data/model to RAM, or even NVMe (!?) . I'm surprised I don't see this project used more.

While on the surface, a 192GB Mac Studio seems like a great deal (it's not much more than a 48GB A6000!), there are several reasons why this might not be a good idea:

* I assume most people have never used llama.cpp Metal w/ large models. It will drop to CPU speeds whenever the context window is full: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/1730#issuecomm... - while sure this might be fixed in the future, it's been an issue since Metal support was added, and is a significant problem if you are actually trying to actually use it for inferencing. With 192GB of memory, you could probably run larger models w/o quantization, but I've never seen anyone post benchmarks of their experiences. Note that at that point, the limited memory bandwidth will be a big factor.

* If you are planning on using Apple Silicon for ML/training, I'd also be wary. There are multi-year long open bugs in PyTorch[1], and most major LLM libs like deepspeed, bitsandbytes, etc don't have Apple Silicon support[2][3].

You can see similar patterns w/ Stable Diffusion support [4][5] - support lagging by months, lots of problems and poor performance with inference, much less fine tuning. You can apply this to basically any ML application you want (srt, tts, video, etc)

Macs are fine to poke around with, but if you actually plan to do more than run a small LLM and say "neat", especially for a business, recommending a Mac for anyone getting started w/ ML workloads is a bad take. (In general, for anyone getting started, unless you're just burning budget, renting cloud GPU is going to be the best cost/perf, although on-prem/local obviously has other advantages.)

[1] https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/issues/1580

[3] https://github.com/TimDettmers/bitsandbytes/issues/485

[4] https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/disc...

[5] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ai-generated-art-stable...

And https://github.com/microsoft/deepspeed

DeepSpeed Chat: Easy, Fast and Affordable RLHF Training of ChatGPT-like Models at All Scales (https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/tree/master/blogs/deepspeed-chat)