vLLM
Also known as: PagedAttention
An open-source serving engine with PagedAttention. Much higher throughput than naive HF Transformers serving.
A high-throughput LLM serving engine built around PagedAttention, a KV-cache management scheme inspired by OS virtual memory paging. Serves significantly more concurrent requests than naive batching on the same hardware.
In practice
Default open-source choice for self-hosted inference. Senior infra interviews dig into PagedAttention vs the KV cache memory math.
Related topics
Questions that mention this term
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Related terms
AI System Design
End-to-end design of production LLM systems: ingestion, retrieval, serving, eval, monitoring.
API LLM
An LLM accessed through a provider API: pay per token, get the frontier model, hand over ops.
Beam Search
Keep the K best partial sequences at each step; deterministic, breadth-first decoding.
FlashAttention
A memory-aware attention kernel that's 2-4x faster than vanilla, with identical math.
GGUF
Self-contained binary format for quantized LLMs; the standard for llama.cpp / Ollama / LM Studio.
Greedy Decoding
At each step, pick the single highest-probability token. Fast and deterministic, but often loops.