Papers › DeepSpeed Inference: Enabling Efficient Inference of Transformer Models at Unprecedented Scale

DeepSpeed Inference: Enabling Efficient Inference of Transformer Models at Unprecedented Scale

30 Jun 2022arXiv:2207.00032archive 2025-07-28

Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Samyam Rajbhandari, Minjia Zhang, Ammar Ahmad Awan, Cheng Li, Du Li, Elton Zheng, Jeff Rasley, Shaden Smith, Olatunji Ruwase, Yuxiong He

The past several years have witnessed the success of transformer-based models, and their scale and application scenarios continue to grow aggressively. The current landscape of transformer models is increasingly diverse: the model size varies drastically with the largest being of hundred-billion parameters; the model characteristics differ due to the sparsity introduced by the Mixture-of-Experts; the target application scenarios can be latency-critical or throughput-oriented; the deployment hardware could be single- or multi-GPU systems with different types of memory and storage, etc. With such increasing diversity and the fast-evolving pace of transformer models, designing a highly performant and efficient inference system is extremely challenging. In this paper, we present DeepSpeed Inference, a comprehensive system solution for transformer model inference to address the above-mentioned challenges. DeepSpeed Inference consists of (1) a multi-GPU inference solution to minimize latency while maximizing the throughput of both dense and sparse transformer models when they fit in aggregate GPU memory, and (2) a heterogeneous inference solution that leverages CPU and NVMe memory in addition to the GPU memory and compute to enable high inference throughput with large models which do not fit in aggregate GPU memory. DeepSpeed Inference reduces latency by up to 7.3X over the state-of-the-art for latency-oriented scenarios and increases throughput by over 1.5x for throughput-oriented scenarios. Moreover, it enables trillion parameter scale inference under real-time latency constraints by leveraging hundreds of GPUs, an unprecedented scale for inference. It can inference 25x larger models than with GPU-only solutions, while delivering a high throughput of 84 TFLOPS (over 50% of A6000 peak).

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

microsoft/DeepSpeed officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
microsoft/deepspeed-mii mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Mixture-of-Experts

2 archive task tags without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutCosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxSparse TransformerWeight Decay

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections