Mesh LLM: distributed AI computing on iroh
29 points
1 hour ago
| 5 comments
| iroh.computer
| HN
SwellJoe
42 minutes ago
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I note the lack of performance information. I can only imagine it's much, much, slower than any other way to run a larger model (including, e.g. using system RAM and streaming some stuff from disk). Consumer networks, even 10gbit ethernet, are slow as hell compared to local RAM and even disks.

Are we talking 1 token per second for a split model? Less?

Edit: Found a number. On the models list, Qwen 235B A22B says "MoE 235B/22B, proven at 16 tok/s across 2 nodes". They don't say what the nodes are and what network connection they have, but that's a respectable speed. Not quite comfortable for interactive use, but pretty close.

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woadwarrior01
26 minutes ago
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Perf should be fairly straightforward to ballpark. You'll need to transfer roughly 2 . hidden_size . num_shards bytes over the network per token during autoregressive decoding. And divide that number by chunk size during prefill.
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jmercouris
1 hour ago
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I thought about this too, but the throughput over a network is incredibly slow. It’s not usable for interactive use.
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darkpicnic
32 minutes ago
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Does Mesh LLM encrypt the payload between nodes? Is it possible to read requests from other users?
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tekacs
12 minutes ago
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I'm not affiliated, but yes – the main 'point' of iroh is that it's 'dial-a-key', QUIC with encryption based on the keys of the endpoints.
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darkpicnic
48 minutes ago
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cocompute.ai is already doing this really well.
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SwellJoe
45 minutes ago
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Is it? I don't see anything on the website about splitting a model across multiple devices, only about putting local models on the internet, a wholly orthogonal problem (which is already easy with existing tools, since models use an http API).
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darkpicnic
38 minutes ago
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Good point. I know cocompute is working on splitting, but it’s not there yet; I was referring to the round-robin delegation within a trusted pool. Mesh LLM looks great too!
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dnoberon
44 minutes ago
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Cool, always good to have more in the ecosystem. I love Iroh and hope this continues to succeed.
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turtleyacht
1 hour ago
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It sounds like iroh enables distributed compute without having to finangle custom hardware.
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