transformer-deploy VS torch2trt

For 2), I am aware of a few options. Triton inference server is an obvious one as is the ‘transformer-deploy’ version from LDS. My only reservation here is that they require the model compilation or are architecture specific. I am aware of others like Bento, Ray serving and TorchServe. Ideally I would have something that allows any (PyTorch model) to be used without the extra compilation effort (or at least optionally) and has some convenience things like ease of use, easy to deploy, easy to host multiple models and can perform some dynamic batching. Anyway, I am really interested to hear people's experience here as I know there are now quite a few options! Any help is appreciated! Disclaimer - I have no affiliation or are connected in any way with the libraries or companies listed here. These are just the ones I know of. Thanks in advance.

We work for Lefebvre Sarrut, a leading European legal publisher. Several of our products include transformer models in latency sensitive scenarios (search, content recommendation). So far, ONNX Runtime and TensorRT served us well, and we learned interesting patterns along the way that we shared with the community through an open-source library called transformer-deploy. However, recent changes in our environment made our needs evolve:

here you will find a notebook for T5 on GPU with some tricks to make it fast: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/generative-model/t5.ipynb

Check the notebook https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/TorchDynamo/benchmark.ipynb for detailed results, but what we will keep in mind:

notebook: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/generative-model/t5.ipynb (Onnx Runtime only)

Regarding CPU inference, quantization is very easy, and supported by Transformer-deploy , however performance on transformer are very low outside corner cases (like no batch, very short sequence and distilled model), and last Intel generation CPU based instance like C6 or M6 on AWS are quite expensive compared to a cheap GPU like Nvidia T4, to say it otherwise, on transformer, until you are ok with slow inference and takes a small instance (for a PoC for instance), CPU inference is probably not a good idea.

The end to end tutorial: https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy/blob/main/demo/quantization_end_to_end.ipynb

Want to try it 👉 https://github.com/ELS-RD/transformer-deploy

Main thing you want for server inference is auto batching. It's a feature that's included in onnxruntime, torchserve, nvidia triton inference server and ray serve.

If you have a lot of preprocessing and post logic in your model it can be hard to export it for onnxruntime or triton so I usually recommend starting with Ray Serve (https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/serve/index.html) and using an actor that runs inference with a quantized model or optimized with tensorrt (https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/torch2trt)

https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/torch2trt <- pretty straightforward https://github.com/jkjung-avt/tensorrt_demos <- this helped me a lot

I find Pytorch easier to work with generally. Nvidia has a Pytorch --> TensorRT converter which yields some significant speedups and has a simple Python API. Convert the Pytorch model on the Nano.