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Deployment Approach

For distributed deployment of LLM inference, there are two approaches normally:

  1. Start multiple inference instances that each is running on isolated GPU, and use LB like Nginx for load balancing between these instances.

  2. Start a single instance and use tensor_parallel_size>1, and distribute the model weights across multiple GPUs in the same group

Here is the guidance: If the model is too large to fit in a single GPU, we have to use tensor_parallel_size and use multiple GPUs to load the model. If not, start multiple instances on isolated GPUs should have better performance. And using tensor_parallel_size>1 requires communication between GPUs which is quite expensive and complicated, and probably has bad performance.