/inference-serving-tensorrt-llm

name: inference-serving-tensorrt-llm
description: Optimizes LLM inference with NVIDIA TensorRT for maximum throughput and lowest latency. Use for production deployment on NVIDIA GPUs (A100/H100), when you need 10-100x faster inference than PyTorch, or for serving models with quantization (FP8/INT4), in-flight batching, and multi-GPU scaling.
license: MIT
metadata:
  version: 1.0.0
  author: Orchestra Research
  tags: [Inference Serving, TensorRT-LLM, NVIDIA, Inference Optimization, High Throughput, Low Latency, Production, FP8, INT4, In-Flight Batching, Multi-GPU]
  dependencies: [tensorrt-llm, torch]

TensorRT-LLM

NVIDIA's open-source library for optimizing LLM inference with state-of-the-art performance on NVIDIA GPUs.

When to use TensorRT-LLM

**Use TensorRT-LLM when:**

• Deploying on NVIDIA GPUs (A100, H100, GB200)
• Need maximum throughput (24,000+ tokens/sec on Llama 3)
• Require low latency for real-time applications
• Working with quantized models (FP8, INT4, FP4)
• Scaling across multiple GPUs or nodes

**Use vLLM instead when:**

• Need simpler setup and Python-first API
• Want PagedAttention without TensorRT compilation
• Working with AMD GPUs or non-NVIDIA hardware

**Use llama.cpp instead when:**

• Deploying on CPU or Apple Silicon
• Need edge deployment without NVIDIA GPUs
• Want simpler GGUF quantization format

Quick start

Installation

# Docker (recommended)
docker pull nvidia/tensorrt_llm:latest

# pip install
pip install tensorrt_llm==1.2.0rc3

# Requires CUDA 13.0.0, TensorRT 10.13.2, Python 3.10-3.12

Basic inference

from tensorrt_llm import LLM, SamplingParams

# Initialize model
llm = LLM(model="meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B")

# Configure sampling
sampling_params = SamplingParams(
    max_tokens=100,
    temperature=0.7,
    top_p=0.9
)

# Generate
prompts = ["Explain quantum computing"]
outputs = llm.generate(prompts, sampling_params)

for output in outputs:
    print(output.text)

Serving with trtllm-serve

# Start server (automatic model download and compilation)
trtllm-serve meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B \
    --tp_size 4 \              # Tensor parallelism (4 GPUs)
    --max_batch_size 256 \
    --max_num_tokens 4096

# Client request
curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
    "temperature": 0.7,
    "max_tokens": 100
  }'

Key features

Performance optimizations

• **In-flight batching**: Dynamic batching during generation
• **Paged KV cache**: Efficient memory management
• **Flash Attention**: Optimized attention kernels
• **Quantization**: FP8, INT4, FP4 for 2-4× faster inference
• **CUDA graphs**: Reduced kernel launch overhead

Parallelism

• **Tensor parallelism (TP)**: Split model across GPUs
• **Pipeline parallelism (PP)**: Layer-wise distribution
• **Expert parallelism**: For Mixture-of-Experts models
• **Multi-node**: Scale beyond single machine

Advanced features

• **Speculative decoding**: Faster generation with draft models
• **LoRA serving**: Efficient multi-adapter deployment
• **Disaggregated serving**: Separate prefill and generation

Common patterns

Quantized model (FP8)

from tensorrt_llm import LLM

# Load FP8 quantized model (2× faster, 50% memory)
llm = LLM(
    model="meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-70B",
    dtype="fp8",
    max_num_tokens=8192
)

# Inference same as before
outputs = llm.generate(["Summarize this article..."])

Multi-GPU deployment

# Tensor parallelism across 8 GPUs
llm = LLM(
    model="meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-405B",
    tensor_parallel_size=8,
    dtype="fp8"
)

Batch inference

# Process 100 prompts efficiently
prompts = [f"Question {i}: ..." for i in range(100)]

outputs = llm.generate(
    prompts,
    sampling_params=SamplingParams(max_tokens=200)
)

# Automatic in-flight batching for maximum throughput

Performance benchmarks

**Meta Llama 3-8B** (H100 GPU):

• Throughput: 24,000 tokens/sec
• Latency: ~10ms per token
• vs PyTorch: **100× faster**

**Llama 3-70B** (8× A100 80GB):

• FP8 quantization: 2× faster than FP16
• Memory: 50% reduction with FP8

Supported models

• **LLaMA family**: Llama 2, Llama 3, CodeLlama
• **GPT family**: GPT-2, GPT-J, GPT-NeoX
• **Qwen**: Qwen, Qwen2, QwQ
• **DeepSeek**: DeepSeek-V2, DeepSeek-V3
• **Mixtral**: Mixtral-8x7B, Mixtral-8x22B
• **Vision**: LLaVA, Phi-3-vision
• **100+ models** on HuggingFace

References

• **[Optimization Guide](references/optimization.md)** - Quantization, batching, KV cache tuning
• **[Multi-GPU Setup](references/multi-gpu.md)** - Tensor/pipeline parallelism, multi-node
• **[Serving Guide](references/serving.md)** - Production deployment, monitoring, autoscaling

Resources

• **Docs**: https://nvidia.github.io/TensorRT-LLM/
• **GitHub**: https://github.com/NVIDIA/TensorRT-LLM
• **Models**: https://huggingface.co/models?library=tensorrt_llm