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flashinfer-ai/flashinfer

5,610PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

TLDR

FlashInfer is a Python library of highly optimized GPU kernels that makes AI language models run faster at inference time on Nvidia GPUs, reducing response latency and GPU costs for teams serving LLMs to users.

Mindmap

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  root((repo))
    What it does
      Fast attention
      GPU kernels
      Memory management
    GPU support
      Turing cards 2018
      Ampere and Ada
      Blackwell latest
    Features
      Paged KV cache
      Speculative decode
      Mixture of experts
    Use cases
      LLM serving
      Reduce latency
      Lower GPU cost
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Speed up language model responses on Nvidia GPUs by replacing default attention with FlashInfer's optimized kernels.

USE CASE 2

Add paged KV-cache memory management to a multi-user LLM serving system to handle many simultaneous conversations efficiently.

USE CASE 3

Use speculative decoding to increase token output speed for a deployed language model API.

USE CASE 4

Integrate FlashInfer's batch attention API into a custom model serving stack to reduce GPU memory usage and cost.

Tech stack

PythonCUDAC++

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires an Nvidia GPU from the Turing generation or newer, first run downloads or compiles CUDA kernels which can take several minutes.

In plain English

FlashInfer is a Python library that makes AI language models run faster on Nvidia GPUs. It does this by providing carefully optimized low-level code, called kernels, that handle the most computationally intense parts of running these models. The main operation it handles is called attention, a calculation that language models perform constantly to understand the relationships between words and tokens in a sequence. When you run a large language model, the GPU spends a lot of time on attention calculations and on matrix multiplication. FlashInfer provides pre-written, highly tuned versions of these operations that run faster than default implementations. It supports Nvidia GPUs from the Turing generation (around 2018) through the latest Blackwell cards, and it automatically selects the best approach for your specific hardware. The library is designed for people building production systems that serve AI models to users, not for those training models from scratch. It handles memory management techniques like paged KV-cache, which helps when you are serving many users at once with different conversation lengths. It also includes support for mixture-of-experts model architectures used by models like DeepSeek, and for speculative decoding, a technique that can increase output speed by generating and verifying multiple tokens in parallel. Installation is done through pip. You can install the core package, which compiles or downloads the needed kernel code on first use, or install pre-compiled binaries to skip that step. The library also includes command-line tools for checking your setup, listing installed modules, and managing cached kernel files. FlashInfer is suited for teams running inference infrastructure for large language models and looking to reduce latency or GPU costs. It sits at a lower level than frameworks like vLLM or TensorRT, and those frameworks sometimes use it underneath their own abstractions.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to install FlashInfer via pip and run a basic single-request attention forward pass using its Python API on an Nvidia GPU.
Prompt 2
Help me integrate FlashInfer's paged KV-cache attention into a Python LLM serving loop that handles multiple users with different conversation lengths.
Prompt 3
Using FlashInfer, show me how to set up speculative decoding to speed up output generation for a 7 billion parameter language model.
Prompt 4
I am building an LLM inference server, help me replace a naive attention loop with FlashInfer's batch prefill API to reduce GPU memory pressure.
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