Vidur: LLM Inference Simulator

Vidur is a high-fidelity and extensible LLM inference simulator. It can help you with:

1. Capacity planning and finding the best deployment configuration for your LLM deployments.
2. Test new research ideas like new scheduling algorithms, optimizations like speculative decoding, etc.
3. Study the system performance of models under different workloads and configurations.

... all without access to GPUs except for a quick initial profiling phase.

Please refer to our MLSys'24 paper for more details. We have a talk with live demo that captures the capabilities of the system.

Supported Models

• Instructions on adding a new model to existing or new SKUs can be found here.
• All models support a maximum context length of 2M.
• Pipeline parallelism is supported for all models. The PP dimension should divide the number of layers in the model.
• In DGX nodes, there are 8 GPUs, fully connected via NVLink. So TP1, TP2, TP4 and TP8 are supported.
• In 4x pairwise NVLink nodes, there are 4 GPUs, so TP1, TP2 and TP4 are supported. TP4 here is less performant than TP4 in DGX nodes because (GPU1, GPU2) are connected via NVLink and (GPU3, GPU4) are connected via NVLink. but between these layers, the interconnect is slower.
• You can use any combination of TP and PP. For example, you can run LLaMA2-70B on TP2-PP2 on a 4xA100 80GB Pairwise NVLink Node.

Chrome Trace

Vidur exports chrome traces of each simulation. The trace can be found in the simulator_output directory. The trace can be opened by navigating to chrome://tracing/ or edge://tracing/ and loading the trace.

Setup

Using mamba

To run the simulator, create a mamba environment with the given dependency file.

mamba env create -p ./env -f ./environment-dev.yml

Using venv

1. Ensure that you have Python 3.12 installed on your system. Refer https://www.bitecode.dev/p/installing-python-the-bare-minimum
2. cd into the repository root
3. Create a virtual environment using venv module using python3.12 -m venv .venv
4. Activate the virtual environment using source .venv/bin/activate
5. Install the dependencies using python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
6. Run deactivate to deactivate the virtual environment

Using conda (Least recommended)

To run the simulator, create a conda environment with the given dependency file.

conda env create -p ./env -f ./environment.yml
conda env update -f environment-dev.yml

Setting up wandb (Optional)

First, setup your account on https://<your-org>.wandb.io/ or public wandb, obtain the api key and then run the following command,

wandb login --host https://<your-org>.wandb.io

To opt out of wandb, pick any one of the following methods:

1. export WANDB_MODE=disabled in your shell or add this in ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc. Remember to reload using source ~/.zshrc.
2. Set wandb_project and wandb_group as "" in vidur/config/default.yml. Also, remove these CLI params from the shell command with which the simulator is invoked.

Running the simulator

To run the simulator, execute the following command from the repository root,

python -m vidur.main

or a big example with all the parameters,

python -m vidur.main  \
--replica_config_device a100 \
--replica_config_model_name meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf  \
--cluster_config_num_replicas 1 \
--replica_config_tensor_parallel_size 1 \
--replica_config_num_pipeline_stages 1 \
--request_generator_config_type synthetic \
--length_generator_config_type trace \
--interval_generator_config_type static \
--[trace|zipf|uniform|fixed]_request_length_generator_config_max_tokens 4096 \
--trace_request_length_generator_config_trace_file ./data/processed_traces/arxiv_summarization_stats_llama2_tokenizer_filtered_v2.csv \
--synthetic_request_generator_config_num_requests 128  \
--replica_scheduler_config_type vllm  \
--[vllm|lightllm|orca|faster_transformer|sarathi]_scheduler_config_batch_size_cap 256  \
--[vllm|lightllm]_scheduler_config_max_tokens_in_batch 4096

The simulator supports a plethora of parameters for the simulation description which can be found here.

The metrics will be logged to wandb directly and a copy will be stored in the simulator_output directory along with the chrome trace. A description of all the logged metrics can be found here.

Formatting Code

To format code, execute the following command:

make format