Before paying for high-end GPUs for LLM inference, understand your numbers first.
For example, you can deploy most 7B models using AWS EC2 G5 or Microsoft NVadsA10v5 instances, but would you effectively saturate GPU utilization?
To clarify this, I've created a simple visualization.
If you look at the "FP16 Tensor Core" and "GPU Memory Bandwidth" in specs, AWS EC2 G5 offers 70TF, but Microsoft NVadsA10v5 (A10) steps it up with 125TF. That's ~208 ops/bytes compared to AWS's ~116 ops/bytes.
What does this really mean?
The arithmetic intensity of a model like Llama 7B is approximately 60 ops:bytes, significantly lower than the potential computational capacity per byte of memory.
This means that the inference is memory-bound, and more importantly, you are wasting money.
You need to feed GPU more data, that's why various inference engines use continuous batching of incoming requests to increase the total throughput.
There are also many other areas of active research to optimize memory without sacrificing model performance, such as optimizing attention, quantizing the model, or leveraging pipeline or parallelism.
I will be writing a series of posts about GPU inference in the coming days; if you find such content useful, please consider sharing the post, and don't forget to follow for updates.
Wishing everyone a productive week ahead!
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