Quick Start Guide

This is the starting point to try out TensorRT-LLM. Specifically, this Quick Start Guide enables you to quickly get setup and send HTTP requests using TensorRT-LLM.

Prerequisites

This quick start uses the Meta Llama 3.1 model. This model is subject to a particular license. To download the model files, agree to the terms and authenticate with Hugging Face.
Complete the installation steps.
Pull the weights and tokenizer files for the chat-tuned variant of the Llama 3.1 8B model from the Hugging Face Hub.
```
git clone https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
```

LLM API

The LLM API is a Python API designed to facilitate setup and inference with TensorRT-LLM directly within Python. It enables model optimization by simply specifying a HuggingFace repository name or a model checkpoint. The LLM API streamlines the process by managing checkpoint conversion, engine building, engine loading, and model inference, all through a single Python object.

Here is a simple example to show how to use the LLM API with TinyLlama.

from tensorrt_llm import LLM, SamplingParams

prompts = [
    "Hello, my name is",
    "The president of the United States is",
    "The capital of France is",
    "The future of AI is",
]
sampling_params = SamplingParams(temperature=0.8, top_p=0.95)

llm = LLM(model="TinyLlama/TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0")

outputs = llm.generate(prompts, sampling_params)

# Print the outputs.
for output in outputs:
    prompt = output.prompt
    generated_text = output.outputs[0].text
    print(f"Prompt: {prompt!r}, Generated text: {generated_text!r}")

To learn more about the LLM API, check out the API Introduction and LLM Examples Introduction.

Compile the Model into a TensorRT Engine

Use the Llama model definition from the examples/llama directory of the GitHub repository. The model definition is a minimal example that shows some of the optimizations available in TensorRT-LLM.

# From the root of the cloned repository, start the TensorRT-LLM container
make -C docker release_run LOCAL_USER=1

# Log in to huggingface-cli
# You can get your token from huggingface.co/settings/token
huggingface-cli login --token *****

# Convert the model into TensorRT-LLM checkpoint format
cd examples/llama
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install --upgrade transformers # Llama 3.1 requires transformer 4.43.0+ version.
python3 convert_checkpoint.py --model_dir Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct --output_dir llama-3.1-8b-ckpt

# Compile model
trtllm-build --checkpoint_dir llama-3.1-8b-ckpt \
    --gemm_plugin float16 \
    --output_dir ./llama-3.1-8b-engine

When you create a model definition with the TensorRT-LLM API, you build a graph of operations from NVIDIA TensorRT primitives that form the layers of your neural network. These operations map to specific kernels; prewritten programs for the GPU.

In this example, we included the gpt_attention plugin, which implements a FlashAttention-like fused attention kernel, and the gemm plugin, that performs matrix multiplication with FP32 accumulation. We also called out the desired precision for the full model as FP16, matching the default precision of the weights that you downloaded from Hugging Face. For more information about plugins and quantizations, refer to the Llama example and Numerical Precision section.

Run the Model

Now that you have the model engine, run the engine and perform inference.

python3 ../run.py --engine_dir ./llama-3.1-8b-engine  --max_output_len 100 --tokenizer_dir Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct --input_text "How do I count to nine in French?"

Deploy with Triton Inference Server

To create a production-ready deployment of your LLM, use the Triton Inference Server backend for TensorRT-LLM to leverage the TensorRT-LLM C++ runtime for rapid inference execution and include optimizations like in-flight batching and paged KV caching. Triton Inference Server with the TensorRT-LLM backend is available as a pre-built container through NVIDIA NGC.

Clone the TensorRT-LLM backend repository:

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/triton-inference-server/tensorrtllm_backend.git
cd tensorrtllm_backend

Refer to End to end workflow to run llama 7b in the TensorRT-LLM backend repository to deploy the model with Triton Inference Server.

Next Steps

In this Quick Start Guide, you:

Installed and built TensorRT-LLM
Retrieved the model weights
Compiled and ran the model
Deployed the model with Triton Inference Server
As an alternative to deploying the engine with FastAPI-based OpenAI API Server, you can use the trtllm-serve CLI.

For more examples, refer to:

examples/ for showcases of how to run a quick benchmark on latest LLMs.