This article details how to accelerate deep learning and LLM inference using Apache Spark, focusing on distributed inference strategies. It covers basic deployment with `predict_batch_udf`, advanced deployment with inference servers like NVIDIA Triton and vLLM, and deployment on cloud platforms like Databricks and Dataproc. It also provides guidance on resource management and configuration for optimal performance.
Running GenAI models is easy. Scaling them to thousands of users, not so much. This guide details avenues for scaling AI workloads from proofs of concept to production-ready deployments, covering API integration, on-prem deployment considerations, hardware requirements, and tools like vLLM and Nvidia NIMs.
A startup called Backprop has demonstrated that a single Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU, released in 2020, can handle serving a modest large language model (LLM) like Llama 3.1 8B to over 100 concurrent users with acceptable throughput. This suggests that expensive enterprise GPUs may not be necessary for scaling LLMs to a few thousand users.
