serving VS glow

Yet another TEDIOUS BATTLE: Python vs. C++/C stack.

This project gained popularity due to the HIGH DEMAND for running large models with 1B+ parameters, like `llama`. Python dominates the interface and training ecosystem, but prior to llama.cpp, non-ML professionals showed little interest in a fast C++ interface library. While existing solutions like tensorflow-serving [1] in C++ were sufficiently fast with GPU support, llama.cpp took the initiative to optimize for CPU and trim unnecessary code, essentially code-golfing and sacrificing some algorithm correctness for improved performance, which isn't favored by "ML research".

NOTE: In my opinion, a true pioneer was DarkNet, which implemented the YOLO model series and significantly outperformed others [2]. Same trick basically like llama.cpp

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/serving

Which ML framework do you use? Tensorflow has https://github.com/tensorflow/serving. You could also use the Rust bindings to load a saved model and expose it using one of the Rust HTTP servers. It doesn't matter whether you trained your model in Python as long as you export its saved model.

GitHub

You serve models via https://www.tensorflow.org/tfx/guide/serving which is written entirely in C++ (https://github.com/tensorflow/serving/tree/master/tensorflow_serving/model_servers), no Python on the serving path or in the shipped product.

gRPC only connects to a host and port — but we can use whatever service route we want. Above I use the path we configured in our k8s ingress object: /service1, and overwrite the base configuration provided by tensorflow serving. When we call the tfserving_metadata function above, we specify /service1 as an argument.

Pytorch supports other kinds of accelerators (e.g. FPGA, and https://github.com/pytorch/glow), but unless you want to become a ML systems engineer and have money and time to throw away, or a business case to fund it, it is not worth it. In general, both pytorch and tensorflow have hardware abstractions that will compile down to device code. (XLA, https://github.com/pytorch/xla, https://github.com/pytorch/glow). TPUs and GPUs have very different strengths; so getting top performance requires a lot of manual optimizations. Considering the the cost of training LLM, it is time well spent.

It's pretty clear its referring to the output of Apache TVM and Meta's Glow

For reference: In Tensorflow and JAX, for example, the tensor gets compiled to the intermediate XLA format (https://www.tensorflow.org/xla), then passed to the XLA complier (https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/compiler/xla/service) or the new TFRT runtime (https://github.com/tensorflow/runtime/blob/master/documents/tfrt_host_runtime_design.md), or some more esoteric hardware (https://github.com/pytorch/glow).