Distributed-llama is a distributed inference engine and command line tool for running large language models across multiple networked machines. It functions as a compute cluster manager that coordinates worker nodes to share the computational load of a single model.
The system utilizes tensor parallelism to shard model weights across different hosts, allowing the execution of models that exceed the memory capacity of a single piece of hardware. It includes a dedicated format converter to transform standard model files into a compatible binary layout optimized for distributed loading.
The engine provides capabilities for multi-node model execution, worker node management, and text generation through a server interface or interactive chat sessions.