Day 12/90 of Inference Engineering What is chunked prefill within vLLM? In continuation of yesterday's post on the high level architecture of vLLM, I want to dive deeper into vLLM core engine starting with the mechanics of chunked prefill. In this post, I will closely follow the original blog... on the anatomy of vLLM. To start, let's define chunked prefill. It's a runtime inference optimization technique that splits a long input request so that it doesn’t monopolize the whole GPU. Keep in mind this is all within the context of vLLM. And since vLLM is an inference engine that's meant to serve a model to multiple concurrent users, having a GPU that’s fully monopolized on a single user's request means other users' requests would be in queue waiting to be processed. It isn’t too good to have the whole GPU occupied on a single request when the GPU is meant to be shared! So the key idea behind chunked prefill is to break the long request into smaller chunks, so that each chunk along with other users' requests gets processed and written into the KV cache together. Suppose we split up the long request into chunks and each chunk has 8 tokens. Now each memory block can hold 4 tokens. Therefore, 8 tokens can fit into 2 blocks of memory. After the first forward pass, 2 blocks are occupied, and after the second forward pass, 4 blocks of memory are occupied and so forth. Each forward pass handles a small chunk of the long request so that there's room in the same pass to keep serving other users' requests. Here's a small animation that I made today to fully visualize the idea behind chunked prefill when learning this topic~show more

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