tensorrtllm_backend VS model_navigator

Nvidia Triton Inference Server with the TensorRT-LLM backend:

https://github.com/triton-inference-server/tensorrtllm_backe...

It’s used by Mistral, AWS, Cloudflare, and countless others.

vLLM, HF TGI, Rayserve, etc are certainly viable but Triton has many truly unique and very powerful features (not to mention performance).

100k DAU doesn’t mean much, you’d need to get a better understanding of the application, input tokens, generated output tokens, request rates, peaks, etc not to mention required time to first token, tokens per second, etc.

Anyway, the point is Triton is just about the only thing out there for use in this general range and up.

I support any progress to erode the Nvidia monopoly.

That said from what I'm seeing here the free and open source (less other aspects of the CUDA stack, of course) TensorRT-LLM[0] almost certainly bests this implementation using the Nvidia hardware they reference for comparison.

I don't have an A6000 but as an example with the tensorrt_llm backend for Nvidia Triton Inference Server (also free and open source) I get roughly 30 req/s with Mistral 7B on my RTX 4090 with significantly lower latency. Comparison benchmarks are tough, especially when published benchmarks like these are fairly scant on the real details.

TensorRT-LLM has only been public for a few months and if you peruse the docs, PRs, etc you'll see they have many more optimizations in the works.

In typical Nvidia fashion TensorRT-LLM runs on any Nvidia card (from laptop to datacenter) going back to Turing (five year old cards) assuming you have the VRAM.

You can download and run this today, free and "open source" for these implementations at least. I'm extremely skeptical of the claim "MK1 Flywheel has the Best Throughput and Latency for LLM Inference on NVIDIA". You'll note they compare to vLLM, which is an excellent and incredible project but if you look at vLLM vs Triton w/ TensorRT-LLM the performance improvements are dramatic.

Of course it's the latest and greatest ($$$$$$ and unobtanium) but one look at H100/H200 performance[3] and you can see what happens when the vendor has a robust software ecosystem to help sell their hardware. Pay the Nvidia tax on the frontend for the hardware, get it back as a dividend on the software.

I feel like MK1 must be aware of TensorRT-LLM but of course those comparison benchmarks won't help sell their startup.

[0] - https://github.com/NVIDIA/TensorRT-LLM

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

[2] - https://mkone.ai/blog/mk1-flywheel-race-tuned-and-track-read...

[3] - https://github.com/NVIDIA/TensorRT-LLM/blob/main/docs/source...

- While keeping power utilization below X

They will take the exported model and dynamically deploy the package to a triton instance running on your actual inference serving hardware, then generate requests to meet your SLAs to come up with the optimal model configuration. You even get exported metrics and pretty reports for every configuration used/attempted. You can take the same exported package, change the SLA params, and it will automatically re-generate the configuration for you.

- Performance on a completely different level. TensorRT-LLM especially is extremely new and very early but already at high scale you can start to see > 10k RPS on a single node.

- gRPC support. Especially when using pre/post processing, ensemble, etc you can configure clients programmatically to use the individual models or the ensemble chain (as one example). This opens up a very wide range of powerful architecture options that simply aren't available anywhere else. gRPC could probably be thought of as AsyncLLMEngine, it can abstract actual input/output or expose raw in/out so models, tokenizers, decoders, etc can send/receive raw data/numpy/tensors.

- DALI support[5]. Combined with everything above, you can add DALI in the processing chain to do things like take input image/audio/etc, copy to GPU once, GPU accelerate scaling/conversion/resampling/whatever, and get output.

vLLM and HF TGI are very cool and I use them in certain cases. The fact you can give them a HF model and they just fire up with a single command and offer good performance is very impressive but there are an untold number of reasons these providers use Triton. It's in a class of its own.

[0] - https://mistral.ai/news/la-plateforme/

[1] - https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2023/cloudflare-po...

[2] - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/case-studies/amazon-accelerates...

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

[4] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/client/blob/main/...

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