Serve an LLM (Llama3.1 405B) using multiple GPU nodes


Overview

This tutorial shows you how to serve Llama 3.1 405b using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) across multiple nodes on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), using the vLLM serving framework and the LeaderWorkerSet (LWS) API.

This document is a good starting point if you need the granular control, scalability, resilience, portability, and cost-effectiveness of managed Kubernetes when deploying and serving your AI/ML workloads.

LeaderWorkerSet (LWS)

LWS is a Kubernetes deployment API that addresses common deployment patterns of AI/ML multi-node inference workloads. LWS enables treating multiple Pods as a group.

Multi-Host Serving with vLLM

When deploying exceptionally large language models that cannot fit into a single GPU node, use multiple GPU nodes to serve the model. vLLM supports both tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism to run workloads across GPUs.

Tensor parallelism splits the matrix multiplications in the transformer layer across multiple GPUs. However, this strategy requires a fast network due to the communication needed between the GPUs, making it less suitable for running workloads across nodes.

Pipeline parallelism splits the model by layer, or vertically. This strategy does not require constant communication between GPUs, making it a better option when running models across nodes.

You can use both strategies in multi-node serving. For example, when using two nodes with 8 H100 GPUs each, you can use two-way pipeline parallelism to shard the model across the two nodes, and eight-way tensor parallelism to shard the model across the eight GPUs on each node.

Objectives

  1. Prepare a GKE Standard cluster.
  2. Deploy vLLM across multiple nodes in your cluster.
  3. Use vLLM to serve Llama3 405b model through curl.

Before you begin

  • Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
  • In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

    Go to project selector

  • Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

  • Enable the required API.

    Enable the API

  • In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

    Go to project selector

  • Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

  • Enable the required API.

    Enable the API

  • Make sure that you have the following role or roles on the project: roles/container.admin, roles/iam.serviceAccountAdmin

    Check for the roles

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

      Go to IAM
    2. Select the project.
    3. In the Principal column, find all rows that identify you or a group that you're included in. To learn which groups you're included in, contact your administrator.

    4. For all rows that specify or include you, check the Role colunn to see whether the list of roles includes the required roles.

    Grant the roles

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM page.

      Go to IAM
    2. Select the project.
    3. Click Grant access.
    4. In the New principals field, enter your user identifier. This is typically the email address for a Google Account.

    5. In the Select a role list, select a role.
    6. To grant additional roles, click Add another role and add each additional role.
    7. Click Save.

Get access to the model

Generate an access token

If you don't already have one, generate a new Hugging Face token:

  1. Click Your Profile > Settings > Access Tokens.
  2. Select New Token.
  3. Specify a Name of your choice and a Role of at least Read.
  4. Select Generate a token.

Prepare the environment

In this tutorial, you use Cloud Shell to manage resources hosted on Google Cloud. Cloud Shell comes preinstalled with the software you'll need for this tutorial, including kubectl and gcloud CLI.

To set up your environment with Cloud Shell, follow these steps:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, launch a Cloud Shell session by clicking Cloud Shell activation icon Activate Cloud Shell in the Google Cloud console. This launches a session in the bottom pane of Google Cloud console.

  2. Set the default environment variables:

    gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
    export PROJECT_ID=$(gcloud config get project)
    export CLUSTER_NAME=CLUSTER_NAME
    export ZONE=ZONE
    export HF_TOKEN=HUGGING_FACE_TOKEN
    

    Replace the following values:

    • PROJECT_ID: your Google Cloud project ID.
    • CLUSTER_NAME: the name of your GKE cluster.
    • ZONE: A zone that supports H100s.

Create a GKE cluster

Create a GKE Standard cluster with two CPU nodes:

gcloud container clusters create CLUSTER_NAME \
    --project=PROJECT_ID \
    --num-nodes=2 \
    --location=ZONE \
    --machine-type=e2-standard-16

Create GPU node pool

Create an A3 node pool with two nodes, with eight H100s each:

gcloud container node-pools create gpu-nodepool \
    --location=ZONE \
    --num-nodes=2 \
    --machine-type=a3-highgpu-8g \
  --accelerator=type=nvidia-h100-80gb,count=8,gpu-driver-version=LATEST \
    --placement-type=COMPACT \
    --cluster=CLUSTER_NAME

Configure kubectl to communicate with your cluster:

gcloud container clusters get-credentials CLUSTER_NAME --location=ZONE

Create a Kubernetes Secret for Hugging Face credentials

Create a Kubernetes Secret that contains the Hugging Face token:

kubectl create secret generic hf-secret \
  --from-literal=hf_api_token=${HF_TOKEN} \
  --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

Install LeaderWorkerSet

To install LWS, run the following command:

VERSION=v0.3.0
kubectl apply --server-side -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/lws/releases/download/$VERSION/manifests.yaml

Validate that the LeaderWorkerSet controller is running in the lws-system namespace:

kubectl get pod -n lws-system

The output is similar to the following:

NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
lws-controller-manager-5c4ff67cbd-9jsfc   2/2     Running   0          6d23h

Deploy vLLM Model Server

To deploy the vLLM model server, follow these steps:

  1. Inspect the manifest vllm-llama3-405b-A3.yaml.

    
    apiVersion: leaderworkerset.x-k8s.io/v1
    kind: LeaderWorkerSet
    metadata:
      name: vllm
    spec:
      replicas: 1
      leaderWorkerTemplate:
        size: 2
        restartPolicy: RecreateGroupOnPodRestart
        leaderTemplate:
          metadata:
            labels:
              role: leader
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: vllm-leader
                image: us-docker.pkg.dev/vertex-ai/vertex-vision-model-garden-dockers/pytorch-vllm-serve:20240821_1034_RC00
                env:
                  - name: RAY_CLUSTER_SIZE
                    valueFrom:
                      fieldRef:
                        fieldPath: metadata.annotations['leaderworkerset.sigs.k8s.io/size']
                  - name: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                    valueFrom:
                      secretKeyRef:
                        name: hf-secret
                        key: hf_api_token
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - "/workspace/vllm/examples/ray_init.sh leader --ray_cluster_size=$RAY_CLUSTER_SIZE; 
                    python3 -m vllm.entrypoints.openai.api_server --port 8080 --model meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 8 --pipeline-parallel-size 2"
                resources:
                  limits:
                    nvidia.com/gpu: "8"
                    memory: 1124Gi
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                  requests:
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                    cpu: 125
                ports:
                  - containerPort: 8080
                readinessProbe:
                  tcpSocket:
                    port: 8080
                  initialDelaySeconds: 15
                  periodSeconds: 10
                volumeMounts:
                  - mountPath: /dev/shm
                    name: dshm
            volumes:
            - name: dshm
              emptyDir:
                medium: Memory
                sizeLimit: 15Gi
        workerTemplate:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: vllm-worker
                image: us-docker.pkg.dev/vertex-ai/vertex-vision-model-garden-dockers/pytorch-vllm-serve:20240821_1034_RC00
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - "/workspace/vllm/examples/ray_init.sh worker --ray_address=$(LWS_LEADER_ADDRESS)"
                resources:
                  limits:
                    nvidia.com/gpu: "8"
                    memory: 1124Gi
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                  requests:
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                    cpu: 125
                env:
                  - name: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                    valueFrom:
                      secretKeyRef:
                        name: hf-secret
                        key: hf_api_token
                volumeMounts:
                  - mountPath: /dev/shm
                    name: dshm   
            volumes:
            - name: dshm
              emptyDir:
                medium: Memory
                sizeLimit: 15Gi
    ---
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Service
    metadata:
      name: vllm-leader
    spec:
      ports:
        - name: http
          port: 8080
          protocol: TCP
          targetPort: 8080
      selector:
        leaderworkerset.sigs.k8s.io/name: vllm
        role: leader
      type: ClusterIP
    
  2. Apply the manifest by running the following command:

    kubectl apply -f vllm-llama3-405b-A3.yaml
    
  3. View the logs from the running model server

    kubectl logs vllm-0 -c vllm-leader
    

    The output should look similar to the following:

    INFO 08-09 21:01:34 api_server.py:297] Route: /detokenize, Methods: POST
    INFO 08-09 21:01:34 api_server.py:297] Route: /v1/models, Methods: GET
    INFO 08-09 21:01:34 api_server.py:297] Route: /version, Methods: GET
    INFO 08-09 21:01:34 api_server.py:297] Route: /v1/chat/completions, Methods: POST
    INFO 08-09 21:01:34 api_server.py:297] Route: /v1/completions, Methods: POST
    INFO 08-09 21:01:34 api_server.py:297] Route: /v1/embeddings, Methods: POST
    INFO:     Started server process [7428]
    INFO:     Waiting for application startup.
    INFO:     Application startup complete.
    INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:8080 (Press CTRL+C to quit)
    

Serve the model

Run the following command to set up port forwarding to the model

kubectl port-forward svc/vllm-leader 8080:8080

Interact with the model using curl

In a new terminal, send a request to the server:

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
    "model": "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct",
    "prompt": "San Francisco is a",
    "max_tokens": 7,
    "temperature": 0
}'

The output should be similar to the following:

{"id":"cmpl-0a2310f30ac3454aa7f2c5bb6a292e6c",
"object":"text_completion","created":1723238375,"model":"meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct","choices":[{"index":0,"text":" top destination for foodies, with","logprobs":null,"finish_reason":"length","stop_reason":null}],"usage":{"prompt_tokens":5,"total_tokens":12,"completion_tokens":7}}

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used in this tutorial, either delete the project that contains the resources, or keep the project and delete the individual resources.

Delete the deployed resources

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources that you created in this guide, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters delete CLUSTER_NAME \
  --location=ZONE

What's next