
## Introduction

Meta's Llama 4 is a breakthrough AI model combining state-of-the-art multimodal capabilities with the computational efficiency of mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. These models can process both text and images through an early fusion design that seamlessly integrates different modalities. Perhaps most impressively, they support context windows of up to 10 million tokens - dramatically expanding what's possible with large language models.

The Llama 4 family includes:

- **Llama 4 Scout**: 17B active parameters with 16 experts - efficient enough to run on modest GPU setups.

- **Llama 4 Maverick**: 17B active parameters but with 128 experts - offering enhanced capabilities while maintaining efficiency.

- **Llama 4 Behemoth**: 288B active parameters with 16 experts - Meta's most powerful model (not yet publicly released).

What makes these models special:

- **Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)**: Unlike traditional models that activate all parameters for every token, MoE models selectively activate only a fraction - dramatically improving computational efficiency.
- **Early Fusion**: Vision and text processing are integrated directly into the model backbone, enabling true multimodal reasoning.
- **10M Token Context Window**: Process entire books, codebases, or document collections in a single prompt - enabling comprehensive analysis impossible with earlier models.

In this guide, we'll deploy Llama 4 models on Vast.ai using three practical hardware configurations:

1. Llama 4 Scout on 8× H100 GPUs
2. Llama 4 Scout on 4× H100 GPUs
3. Llama 4 Maverick on 8× H200 GPUs

You'll learn exactly how to set up each configuration, deploy the models with the vLLM server, and interact with them through an OpenAI-compatible API. By the end, you'll have hands-on experience running some of the most advanced AI models available today.

## Installing Vast

Let's start by installing the Vast.ai command-line tools and setting up our API key:

```bash
pip install --upgrade vastai
```

```bash
# Here we will set our api key
export VAST_API_KEY="" #Your key here
vastai set api-key $VAST_API_KEY
```

## Running Llama 4 Scout on 8× H100s

### Choosing the Right Hardware

First, we need to search for GPUs on Vast.ai to run the Llama 4 Scout model on 8× H100 GPUs with a 200k token context window. This model requires specific hardware capabilities to run efficiently with vLLM's optimizations. Here are our requirements:

1. 8× H100 GPUs (80GB of VRAM each) to accommodate:

   - Llama 4 Scout model weights (17B active parameters with 16 experts)
   - KV Cache for handling the 200k token context window

2. A static IP address for:

   - Stable API endpoint hosting
   - Consistent client connections

3. At least one direct port that we can forward for:

   - vLLM's OpenAI-compatible API server
   - External access to the model endpoint
   - Secure request routing

4. At least 600GB of disk space to hold the model and other dependencies

Let's search for machines that meet these requirements:

```bash
vastai search offers " \
gpu_name = H100_NVL \
num_gpus = 8 \
static_ip = true \
direct_port_count >= 1 \
verified = true \
disk_space >= 600 \
rentable = true"
```

### Deploying the Server via Vast

We'll choose a machine from our search results and copy and paste the id below to set `INSTANCE_ID`.

We use `vastai create instance` to create an instance that:

1. Uses `vllm/vllm-openai:latest` docker image. This gives us an OpenAI-compatible server.
2. Forwards port `8000` to the outside of the container, which is the default OpenAI server port.
3. Uses `--model meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct` to serve the Llama 4 Scout model.
4. Uses Llama 4-specific parameters:
   - `--tensor-parallel-size 8` to distribute inference across multiple GPUs.
   - `--max-model-len 200000` to set a 200k token context window.
   - `--override-generation-config='{"attn_temperature_tuning": true}'` for optimal text generation quality.
5. Uses `--disk 600` to ensure that we have 600GB of disk space for model weights and dependencies.

Note: Ensure that you fill in your huggingface token `HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN` to access the model. You'll need to accept the Llama 4 license terms on the model's huggingface page: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct

```bash
export INSTANCE_ID=19319856 #insert instance ID
vastai create instance $INSTANCE_ID --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --env '-p 8000:8000 -e HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN=HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN' --disk 600 --args --model meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 8 --max-model-len 200000 --override-generation-config='{"attn_temperature_tuning": true}'
```

### Get Instance IP Address and Port

Now, we need to get our IP address and port to call our model. We first need to wait for our machine to download the image and the model and start serving. This will take a few minutes. The logs will show you when it's done.

Next, go to the [Instances tab](https://cloud.vast.ai/instances/) in the Vast AI Console and find the instance you just created.

At the top of the instance, there is a button with an IP address in it. Click this and a panel will show up of the ip address and the forwarded ports.
You should see something like:

```
Open Ports
XX.XX.XXX.XX:YYYY -> 8000/tcp
```

You will need the IP address (XX.XX.XXX.XX) and the port (YYYY) for the next step.

### Call our Model

#### Install OpenAI

To call our model we will install the OpenAI SDK.

```bash
pip install --upgrade openai
```

#### Download our Data

To show the power of our large context window, we will download The Great Gatsby from Project Gutenberg and ask Llama 4 to summarize it.

Here we download the text for the book:

```python
import requests

# Download the text file to a variable
url = "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64317.txt.utf-8"
text = requests.get(url).text

# Print the first 100 characters to confirm it worked
print(text[:200])
```

### Call Our Model

We will then use the OpenAI SDK. To do this, we need to set our `VAST_IP_ADDRESS` and `VAST_PORT` that we found above.

```python
from openai import OpenAI

# Your Vast.ai instance details
VAST_IP_ADDRESS = ""
VAST_PORT = ""

# Initialize the client with your server URL
client = OpenAI(
    api_key="EMPTY",  # vLLM doesn't require an actual API key
    base_url=f"http://{VAST_IP_ADDRESS}:{VAST_PORT}/v1"
)

prompt = "please summarize this book in two sentences:" + text

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": prompt}
    ],

)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
```

### Model Response

We see that our model was able to ingest a large amount of text and summarize our book.

```
Here is a two-sentence summary of The Great Gatsby:

Set in the roaring twenties, The Great Gatsby is a classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that revolves around the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsession with winning back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, the novel explores themes of wealth, class, love, and the corrupting influence of materialism in the excesses of the Jazz Age
```

## Running Llama 4 Scout on 4× H100s

After successfully deploying Scout on 8× H100s, we'll now try a more cost-effective setup using 4× H100s. This will reduce our context window capacity but allow us to save on GPU costs.

We'll start by searching for an instance that meets our specifications:

```bash
vastai search offers " \
num_gpus = 4 \
gpu_name = H100_SXM \
static_ip = true \
direct_port_count >= 1 \
verified = true \
disk_space >= 600 \
rentable = true"
```

We'll choose a machine from our search and create our instance with 4 GPUs and a 100k token context window using `--tensor-parallel-size 4` and `--max-model-len 100000`:

```bash
export INSTANCE_ID= #insert instance ID
vastai create instance $INSTANCE_ID --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --env '-p 8000:8000 -e HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN=HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN' --disk 600 --args --model meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 4 --max-model-len 100000 --override-generation-config='{"attn_temperature_tuning": true}'
```

Once our instance is running, we'll set the new `VAST_IP_ADDRESS` and `VAST_PORT` and call our instance like we did earlier:

```python
from openai import OpenAI

# Your Vast.ai instance details
VAST_IP_ADDRESS = ""
VAST_PORT = ""

# Initialize the client with your server URL
client = OpenAI(
    api_key="EMPTY",  # vLLM doesn't require an actual API key
    base_url=f"http://{VAST_IP_ADDRESS}:{VAST_PORT}/v1"
)

prompt = "please summarize this book in two sentences:" + text

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": prompt}
    ],

)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
```

### Model Response

```
Here is a two-sentence summary of The Great Gatsby:

Set in the roaring twenties, The Great Gatsby is a classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that revolves around the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsession with winning back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, the novel explores themes of love, greed, class, and the corrupting influence of wealth, ultimately leading to a tragic confrontation that exposes the dark underbelly of the American Dream.
```

## Running Llama 4 Maverick on 8× H200s

Finally, we'll upgrade to Llama 4's larger Maverick model with a 100k token context window on 8× H200 GPUs - a more powerful configuration that delivers enhanced capabilities.

To start, we'll search for an H200 machine with 8 GPUs:

```bash
vastai search offers " \
num_gpus = 8 \
gpu_name = H200 \
static_ip = true \
direct_port_count >= 1 \
verified = true \
disk_space >= 1000 \
rentable = true"
```

We'll find a machine from our search and create an instance with Llama 4 Maverick using 8 GPUs and a 100k token context window by setting `--disk 1000`, `--model meta-llama/Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct`, `--tensor-parallel-size 8` and `--max-model-len 100000`:

```bash
export INSTANCE_ID= #insert instance ID
vastai create instance $INSTANCE_ID --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --env '-p 8000:8000 -e HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN=HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN' --disk 1000 --args --model meta-llama/Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 8 --max-model-len 100000 --override-generation-config='{"attn_temperature_tuning": true}'
```

Finally, we'll set the new `VAST_IP_ADDRESS` and `VAST_PORT`, change our model to `"meta-llama/Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct"`, and call our instance:

```python
from openai import OpenAI

# Your Vast.ai instance details
VAST_IP_ADDRESS = ""
VAST_PORT = ""

# Initialize the client with your server URL
client = OpenAI(
    api_key="EMPTY",  # vLLM doesn't require an actual API key
    base_url=f"http://{VAST_IP_ADDRESS}:{VAST_PORT}/v1"
)

prompt = "please summarize this book in two sentences:" + text

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="meta-llama/Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": prompt}
    ],

)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
```

### Model Response

```
Here is a two-sentence summary of The Great Gatsby:

The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, who becomes fascinated with his wealthy neighbor Jay Gatsby and becomes entangled in Gatsby's quest to win back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, through a complex web of relationships and tragic events. Ultimately, Gatsby's dream is destroyed, and he is murdered by George Wilson, the husband of Myrtle Wilson, who was having an affair with Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, highlighting the corrupting influence of wealth and the elusiveness of the American Dream.
```

## Conclusion

In this post, we've demonstrated how to deploy Meta's Llama 4 models on Vast.ai using three specific hardware configurations: Llama 4 Scout on 8× H100 GPUs with a 200k token context window, Scout on 4× H100 GPUs with a 100k context window, and Llama 4 Maverick on 8× H200 GPUs with a 100k context window. We've shown that with the right GPU setup, you can easily deploy and interact with these models through an OpenAI-compatible API.

Now that you have a basic deployment working, here are some next steps you might consider:

- **Expand the context window**: While we demonstrated context windows of 100k-200k tokens, Llama 4 supports up to 10M tokens. Try increasing `--max-model-len` to experiment with longer documents, books, or codebases. Note: You will also need to increase the number of GPUs.

- **Explore multimodal capabilities**: The tutorial focused on text processing, but Llama 4 is natively multimodal. Try adapting the deployment to accept image inputs using vLLM's multimodal capabilities and the early fusion architecture.

By leveraging Vast.ai's flexible GPU infrastructure, you can cost-effectively experiment with these cutting-edge models and build applications that take advantage of their sophisticated reasoning capabilities.


Learn how to deploy and interact with Meta's Llama 4 models on Vast.ai using three specific hardware configurations: Llama 4 Scout on 8× H100 GPUs with a 200k token context window, Scout on 4× H100 GPUs with a 100k context window, and Llama 4 Maverick on 8× H200 GPUs with a 100k context window.

Running Llama 4 Models on Vast.ai


The growth of AI is outpacing compute. Today, there's an unprecedented demand for computing power as interest in AI surges worldwide – and servers just can't keep up.

More advanced AI models require increasingly powerful hardware. **Without enough GPUs, these large-scale AI systems struggle to run, and also cannot improve.**

Even OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has [admitted](https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/31/openai-ceo-sam-altman-says-lack-of-compute-is-delaying-the-companys-products/) that computing limitations are slowing down the company's ability to release new products. Microsoft's CFO, Amy Woods, [noted](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2025/earnings-fy-2025-q1) last year that demand for AI "continues to be higher" than their "available capacity."

If industry giants like OpenAI and Microsoft are feeling the strain, smaller organizations face even steeper challenges. Without deep pockets or dedicated data centers, they often have no choice but to explore other options.

With GPUs in short supply and demand skyrocketing, many companies are turning to a more flexible, scalable solution: **GPU-as-a-service, or GPUaaS**.

## What Is GPU-as-a-Service?

Simply put, **GPUaaS is a cloud-based solution that provides on-demand access to high-performance GPUs.** It fills a gap in the AI industry by enabling customers to rent the compute power they need, scaling up or down as their workloads demand.

Big cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure offer GPU instances, but GPUaaS goes further. Platforms like our own here at Vast.ai tap into a decentralized network of idle GPUs from data centers, enterprises, and even individuals, making high-performance compute more affordable and widely available.

As a result, GPUaaS addresses a critical need: namely, that **AI infrastructure must be scalable, cost-efficient, and accessible to everyone.**

## Why GPUaaS Is the Key to Scalable AI Infrastructure

AI adoption shows no sign of slowing down – and with it comes fluctuating and unpredictable demand for computing power at any given time. Traditional centralized infrastructure isn't well suited to this type of volatility.

Relying on centralized GPU resources often leads to wasted potential and frustrating roadblocks, such as:

-   **High upfront costs** for purchasing and maintaining GPUs.
-   **Underutilized hardware** during slow periods, resulting in inefficiency and wasted costs.
-   **Bottlenecks** when demand spikes, slowing down innovation and delaying results.
-   **Limited access** to GPUs due to supply chain slowdowns and shortages, impacting AI scalability.

This is where GPU-as-a-Service offers a smarter solution. With GPUaaS, you can:

-   **Quickly scale AI workloads** to match demand without over-provisioning.
-   **Reduce costs** with a flexible pay-as-you-go model while eliminating the risks of heavy upfront investment.
-   **Access worldwide GPU resources**, minimizing latency and enhancing performance.
-   **Decrease energy consumption** by leveraging existing, idle GPUs instead of powering additional servers.

## GPUaaS: The Future of AI Compute is Flexible

As AI continues to advance, organizations that can efficiently scale their compute power will have a clear advantage. GPU-as-a-Service reduces the barriers of cost, accessibility, and scalability, offering an alternative to traditional infrastructure. With GPUaaS, you can tap into a global network of GPUs and ensure you always have the resources you need, when you need them.

So why wait? In a world where AI innovation moves fast, compute should never be the bottleneck. **Vast.ai makes enterprise-grade GPUs accessible and affordable through our decentralized marketplace, offering savings of 5-6X on GPU compute.** Whether you're training cutting-edge models or running large-scale inference, we provide the flexibility and efficiency to keep your AI projects moving forward.

Get started and harness the power of GPUaaS with Vast.ai today!

GPU shortages are slowing AI growth. GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offers a scalable, cost-effective solution for on-demand AI compute power.

GPU-as-a-Service: The Scalable Solution to AI's Compute Crisis


We're back with another monthly update for our customers old and new! As we continue to redefine norms in cloud GPU rental, we're committed to continuously refining our platform.

This month, we've revamped the billing page! We also fixed an issue with earnings payouts showing incorrectly and added some clarity and warnings about auto-billing to the new billing page.

Plus, we've expanded our list of GPU types to include the H100 NVL. Designed exclusively for large language model (LLM) deployment, the NVIDIA H100 NVL is a powerhouse for high-performance computing. It's our hope that hosts and renters alike can benefit from this new addition that broadens the options on Vast.

No service is immune to hiccups, but we prioritize swift action to tackle any bugs that arise – so you can depend on a seamless customer experience. Here are some of the latest bug fixes we've implemented since our last update:

- Fixed PDF export issues
- Recommended templates now show properly
- Improved error notifications
- Fixed SSH validation issues
- Fixed machine earnings discrepancy for hosts
- Hosts now receive correct portion of early termination penalty for reserved instances

## Cloud GPU Rental Platform Updates

Here at Vast.ai, our platform updates go beyond just routine maintenance. As mentioned, we have a new billing page and added the H100 NVL as a new GPU type – and the following are a few more updates from this month:

- New auth flow and consistent visuals
- New CLI launch_instance combines search/create command
- Autoscaler/serverless docs have been updated
- Slight fixes to threshold and newsletter

For the full list of all improvements from this month, check out the change log at the bottom of this page.

If you have any questions or need assistance with navigating our platform, don't hesitate to reach out. Our team is always ready to provide support and ensure you get the most out of your GPU rental experience. Feel free to contact us through the chatbox at the bottom right, email us at support@vast.ai, or join our dynamic Discord community for additional insights and resources. We're here to help you every step of the way!

## Change Log

### Features:
- New billing page
- New auth flow and consistent visuals
- New CLI launch_instance combines search/create command
- New machine page and bulk edit
- Added automatic soft blacklisting to search based on user's personal report machine history
- Search backend now supports continent options like front end
- CLI/API logs command now supports a grep option

### Bug Fixes:
- Refunded payments now display properly
- Fixed PDF export issues
- Recommended templates now show properly
- Improved error notifications
- Fixed SSH validation issues
- Fixed machine earnings discrepancy for hosts
- Hosts now receive correct portion of early termination penalty for reserved instances
- Fixed issue with earnings payouts showing incorrectly on billing page
- Added auto-billing clarity & warnings to new billing page
- Warning when copying a public template
- Transfers shown properly on billing page
- Autobilling threshold fixed for team accounts
- GPU occupancy now shows for unlisted machines
- Gpu option search query filter works
- Open button for auth instances
- Reserved pricing coherent display
- Billing page properly shows negative balance
- Billing page properly shows failed payments
- Cloud rsync creates dest drives instead of failing
- Fixed env parsing bug in create_instance using template_hash
- Added autoscaler tag option for templates
- Misc UX/UI Improvements

### Miscellaneous Tasks:
- Added H100 NVL as a new GPU type
- Updated Autoscaler/serverless docs
- Updated billing text & warnings
- Slight fixes to threshold and newsletter


This month's update includes a revamped billing page, the addition of the H100 NVL GPU, and various bug fixes and improvements to enhance your experience on Vast.ai.

July 2024 Monthly Update: Billing Page Revamp, H100 NVL GPU Addition, and More!


# Serving Online Inference with vLLM on Vast.ai

## Background

vLLM is an open source framework for Large Language model inference. It specifically focuses on throughput for serving and batch workloads. This is important for building apps for multiple users and at scale.

vLLM provides an OpenAI compatible server, which means that you can integrate it into chatbots, and other applications

As companies build out their AI products, they often hit roadblocks like rate limits and cost for using these models. With vLLM on Vast, you can run your own models in the form factor you need, but with much more affordable compute. As inference grows in demand with agents and complicated workflows, vLLM on Vast shines for performance and affordability where you need it the most.

This guide will show you how to setup vLLM to serve an LLM on Vast. We reference a notebook that you can use [here](https://nbviewer.org/urls/bitbucket.org/%21api/2.0/snippets/jsbcannell/XEyMo8/72acf45925f8230b75195b7da9fff1884fa4052d/files/serving_vllm_on_vast.json)

## Setup and Querying

First, we setup our environment and vast api key

```bash
pip install --upgrade vastai
```

Once you create your account, you can go [here](https://cloud.vast.ai/cli/) to find your API Key.

```bash
vastai set api-key <Your-API-Key-Here>
```

For serving an LLM, we're looking for a machine that has a static IP address, ports available to host on, plus a single modern GPU with decent RAM since we're going to serve a single small model. `vLLM` also requires Cuda version 12.4 or higher, so we will filter for that as well. We will query the vast API to get a list of these types of machines.

```bash
vastai search offers 'compute_cap > 800 gpu_ram > 20 num_gpus = 1 static_ip=true direct_port_count > 1 cuda_vers >= 12.4'
```

## Deploying the Image:

The easiest way to deploy this instance is to use the command line. Copy and Paste a specific instance id you choose from the list above into `instance-id` below.

```bash
vastai create instance <instance-id> --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --env '-p 8000:8000' --disk 40 --args --model stabilityai/stablelm-2-zephyr-1_6b
```

## Connecting and Testing:

To connect to your instance, we'll first need to get the IP address and port number. Once your instance is done setting up, you should see something like this:
![Instance_view](/uploads/instance_view_vllm.png)

Click on the highlighted button to see the IP address and correct port for our requests.

![IP_address_view](/uploads/ip_address_view_vllm.png)

We will copy over the IP address and the port into the cell below.

```bash
# This request assumes you haven't changed the model. If you did, fill it in the "model" value in the payload json below
curl -X POST http://<IP-Address>:<Port>/v1/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json"  -d '{"model" : "stabilityai/stablelm-2-zephyr-1_6b", "prompt": "Hello, how are you?", "max_tokens": 50}'
```

You will see a response from your model in the output. Your model is up and running on Vast!

In the [notebook](https://nbviewer.org/urls/bitbucket.org/%21api/2.0/snippets/jsbcannell/XEyMo8/72acf45925f8230b75195b7da9fff1884fa4052d/files/serving_vllm_on_vast.json), we include ways to call this model with requests or OpenAI

## Advanced Usage: Serving a Quantized Llama-3-70b Model:

Now that we've spun up a model on vLLM, we can get into more complicated deployments. We'll work on serving this specific quantized Llama-3 70B [model](https://huggingface.co/casperhansen/llama-3-70b-instruct-awq).

With this quantized model, we can easilly serve this model on on 4 4090 GPU's.

### What is different this time around:

1. The model string - we need to use the new model id.
2. We're going to use 4 GPU's instead of just 1.
3. We need to provision much more space on our system to be able to download the full set of weights. 100 GB in this case should be fine.
4. We need to set up tensor parallelism inside vLLM to split up the model across these 4 gpus.
5. We need to let vLLM know that this is a quantized model

First, we will search for instances that match our needs

```bash
vastai search offers 'compute_cap >= 800 gpu_ram >= 24 num_gpus = 4 static_ip=true direct_port_count > 1 cuda_vers >= 12.4'
```

In our instance creation, we will increase our disk usage to 100GB.

Then, we will tell vllm to: 1. use the specific model, 2. split across 4 GPU's, and 3. Let it know that it is in fact a quantized model.

```bash
vastai create instance <Instance-ID> --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --env '-p 8000:8000' --disk 100 --args --model casperhansen/llama-3-70b-instruct-awq --tensor-parallel-size 4  --quantization awq
```

### Other things to look out for with other configurations:

If you are downloading a model that needs authentication from the huggingface hub, passing `-e HF_token=<Your-Read-Only-Token>` within vast's `--env` variable string should help.

Sometimes the full context of a model can't be used given the space allocated for vLLM on the GPU + the models size. In those cases, you might want to increase `--gpu-memory-utilization`, or decrease the `max-model-len`. Increasing `--gpu-memory-utilization` does come with CUDA OutOfMemory Issues that can be hard to predict ahead of time.

We won't need either of these for this specific model and GPU configuration.

### Testing:

Copy the IP address from your instance once it is ready, and then we can use the following code to call it. Note that while your server might have ports ready, the model might not have downloaded yet as it is much larger this time. You can check the status of this via the logs to see when it has started serving.

```bash
import requests

headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
}

json_data = {
    'model': 'casperhansen/llama-3-70b-instruct-awq',
    'prompt': 'Hello, how are you?',
    'max_tokens': 50,
}

response = requests.post('http://<Instance-IP-Address>:<Port>/v1/completions', headers=headers, json=json_data)
print(response.content)
```

Or use Open AI:

```bash
pip install openai
```

```python
from openai import OpenAI

# Modify OpenAI's API key and API base to use vLLM's's API server.
openai_api_key = "EMPTY"
openai_api_base = "http://<Instance-IP-Address>:<Port>/v1"
client = OpenAI(
    api_key=openai_api_key,
    base_url=openai_api_base,
)
completion = client.completions.create(model="casperhansen/llama-3-70b-instruct-awq",
                                      prompt="Hello, how are you?",
                                      max_tokens=50)
print("Completion result:", completion)
```

## Conclusions

Model inference is expensive, and leveraging more affordable compute/models makes a huge difference for engineering teams in terms of margins, and shipping velocity.

Using vLLM on Vast is perfect for this, pairing Vast's access to affordable compute with the simplicity and State of the Art throughput of the vLLM backend.

vLLM is a great beginning to building Generative AI Apps. We will continue to explore using this tool more with Vast in future posts.

Llama-3 is already ready to go on Vast to start experimenting and building!


Leverage the power of vLLM for efficient and scalable language model inference on Vast.ai's affordable compute infrastructure.

Posts about: Cloud Computing

Running Llama 4 Models on Vast.ai

GPU-as-a-Service: The Scalable Solution to AI's Compute Crisis

July 2024 Monthly Update: Billing Page Revamp, H100 NVL GPU Addition, and More!

Serving Online Inference with vLLM API on Vast.ai