Mesh LLM: distributed AI computing on iroh

(iroh.computer)

26 points | by tionis 1 hour ago

6 comments

  • SwellJoe 35 minutes ago
    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.

    • woadwarrior01 20 minutes ago
      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.
  • darkpicnic 25 minutes ago
    Does Mesh LLM encrypt the payload between nodes? Is it possible to read requests from other users?
    • tekacs 6 minutes ago
      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.
  • jmercouris 1 hour ago
    I thought about this too, but the throughput over a network is incredibly slow. It’s not usable for interactive use.
  • darkpicnic 41 minutes ago
    cocompute.ai is already doing this really well.
    • SwellJoe 39 minutes ago
      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).
      • darkpicnic 32 minutes ago
        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!
    • dnoberon 37 minutes ago
      Cool, always good to have more in the ecosystem. I love Iroh and hope this continues to succeed.
  • turtleyacht 1 hour ago
    It sounds like iroh enables distributed compute without having to finangle custom hardware.
  • nttylock 1 hour ago
    [flagged]