TensorRT-LLM is NVIDIA's open-source LLM inference library (Apache 2.0). It offline-compiles model weights and compute graphs into optimized TensorRT engines, then serves them with custom CUDA kernels, in-flight batching, and multi-dimensional parallelism. The cost: NVIDIA GPUs only, compilation takes tens of minutes, and switching models or quantization means rebuilding.
Lecture 5 explains GPUs through SMs, warps, and the memory hierarchy, then unifies common optimization under low precision, fusion, recomputation, coalescing, and tiling. FlashAttention combines those principles for attention.
Lecture 6 turns GPU principles into kernels: benchmark scaling across shapes, profile actual calls and time, then implement GeLU, softmax, reductions, and tiled matrix multiplication in Triton. Speed begins with measuring correctly.
llama.cpp is the most widely used local LLM inference engine, implemented in pure C/C++. It supports CPU, Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, and other backends, and uses the GGUF quantization format to run multi-billion-parameter models on consumer hardware.