Text Generation Inference

A Rust, Python and gRPC server for text generation inference. Used in production at HuggingFace to power LLMs api-inference widgets.

Table of contents

• Features
• Officially Supported Models
• Get Started
  • Docker
  • API Documentation
  • A note on Shared Memory
  • Local Install
  • CUDA Kernels
• Run BLOOM
  • Download
  • Run
  • Quantization
• Develop
• Testing

Features

• Token streaming using Server-Sent Events (SSE)
• Dynamic batching of incoming requests for increased total throughput
• Quantization with bitsandbytes
• Safetensors weight loading
• 45ms per token generation for BLOOM with 8xA100 80GB
• Logits warpers (temperature scaling, topk, repetition penalty ...)
• Stop sequences
• Log probabilities

Officially supported models

• BLOOM
• BLOOMZ
• MT0-XXL
• Galactica (deactivated)
• SantaCoder
• GPT-Neox 20B
• FLAN-T5-XXL

Other models are supported on a best effort basis using:

AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(<model>, device_map="auto")

or

AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(<model>, device_map="auto")

Get started

Docker

The easiest way of getting started is using the official Docker container:

model=bigscience/bloom-560m
num_shard=2
volume=$PWD/data # share a volume with the Docker container to avoid downloading weights every run

docker run --gpus all --shm-size 1g -p 8080:80 -v $volume:/data ghcr.io/huggingface/text-generation-inference:latest --model-id $model --num-shard $num_shard

You can then query the model using either the /generate or /generate_stream routes:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/generate \
    -X POST \
    -d '{"inputs":"Testing API","parameters":{"max_new_tokens":9}}' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/generate_stream \
    -X POST \
    -d '{"inputs":"Testing API","parameters":{"max_new_tokens":9}}' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Note: To use GPUs, you need to install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

API documentation

You can consult the OpenAPI documentation of the text-generation-inference REST API using the /docs route. The Swagger UI is also available at: https://huggingface.github.io/text-generation-inference.

A note on Shared Memory (shm)

NCCL is a communication framework used by PyTorch to do distributed training/inference. text-generation-inference make use of NCCL to enable Tensor Parallelism to dramatically speed up inference for large language models.

In order to share data between the different devices of a NCCL group, NCCL might fall back to using the host memory if peer-to-peer using NVLink or PCI is not possible.

To allow the container to use 1G of Shared Memory and support SHM sharing, we add --shm-size 1g on the above command.

If you are running text-generation-inference inside Kubernetes. You can also add Shared Memory to the container by creating a volume with:

- name: shm
  emptyDir:
   medium: Memory
   sizeLimit: 1Gi

and mounting it to /dev/shm.

Finally, you can also disable SHM sharing by using the NCCL_SHM_DISABLE=1 environment variable. However, note that this will impact performance.

Local install

You can also opt to install text-generation-inference locally.

First install Rust and create a Python virtual environment with at least Python 3.9, e.g. using conda:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

conda create -n text-generation-inference python=3.9 
conda activate text-generation-inference

Then run:

BUILD_EXTENSIONS=True make install # Install repository and HF/transformer fork with CUDA kernels
make run-bloom-560m

Note: on some machines, you may also need the OpenSSL libraries and gcc. On Linux machines, run:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev gcc -y

CUDA Kernels

The custom CUDA kernels are only tested on NVIDIA A100s. If you have any installation or runtime issues, you can remove the kernels by using the BUILD_EXTENSIONS=False environment variable.

Be aware that the official Docker image has them enabled by default.

Run BLOOM

Download

First you need to download the weights:

make download-bloom

Run

make run-bloom # Requires 8xA100 80GB

Quantization

You can also quantize the weights with bitsandbytes to reduce the VRAM requirement:

make run-bloom-quantize # Requires 8xA100 40GB

Develop

make server-dev
make router-dev

Testing

make python-tests
make integration-tests