Show HN: Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer (github.com)

This is the hacker spirit

Is this inspired by antirez work on ds4?

Amazing job!

Would this cause issues with SSD lifespan?

I wonder if you could replicate this in a Colourful GeForce RTX 50-series GPU, they ship it with 2 NVMe drive slots.

My main question is whether when put into practical use, this can be measured in tokens/second, or more like 1 token per minute... I have seen locally hosted LLM that are as slow as 1 tok/second still be very useful if you give it a project to do something overnight and metaphorically walk away from it, check back with what it has done in 6 or 8 hours.

0.05 to 0.1 tok/s on the other hand, as reported in the URL for the lowest class of hardware, isn't really usable for much.

edit: I think this is a fantastic project in general concept, and look forward to seeing more efforts towards the general idea of being able to run a 350B to 900B size model locally, even if as slow as 1 tok/s, on hardware that ordinary people can afford. Anything along the general concept of "we have fast read NVME SSD storage, we have a big ass model on local disk, we'll read it at 11GB/tok as we need it, not try to load the whole thing".

Your coding style is halfway to IOCCC. I'm just jealous though :)

Question to the OP, have you tested this on a machine where the entire model and context fit in RAM ?

Pretty cool! I've also been playing around with GLM 5.2 this week and was equally impressed. At work we're running it locally on some crazy expensive hardware as a test before starting another project so it's great to see people taking this massive FOSS model release and running it on an average machine, even if it's not terribly practical at this point.

Nice work!

I love seeing that kind of tinkering

I'm not fully understanding this business of MoE so please forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would it be possible to use MPI with a small cluster to distribute the load?

I was actually just working on the same thing as this, but I went down the route of mmapping the entire model into memory to avoid the extra ram usage. I also had Claude implement Medusa[1] on the model to try and avoid loading an additional model into memory but still get the benefits of MTP. Currently at a stop light so I can't list everything and I didn't get to read your full post either yet.

To expand since I just got home, I'm making all of my modifications to llama.cpp, the goal was to eventually put this on a SBC of some kind with an nvme to handle the mmapped files. I think the theoretical limit of my current setup is about 1.8 tok/s based on prior testing but that is also with the additional medusa heads not fully trained (I honestly don't know if the counting it's generated tokens or not.)

In the end it seems like the idea we had is similar, I just don't know how to write an llm parser/runner from scratch yet and instead of specifying what needed to stay in memory I just let the linux kernel handle it.

Oh last note, I also capped llama.cpp usage to 16GB of my 32GB, so it might be possible to get it down even lower.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10774

I've taken a similar strategy w/ image/video gen at https://github.com/cretz/thinfer (see video branch for a ton of work).

Basically I kept needing an inference engine that could stream weights in and out as needed in an LRU manner. So I ended up vibe coding this thing that accepts a `--vram-budget` and stays under it (mostly). It turns out moving mmap'd bytes in and out of VRAM is way cheap compared to compute. Coupled with some pipelining/double-buffering, I almost always end up compute bound not memory bound. Granted I use way smaller models heh.

This is great, well done! I love seeing people run things where they weren't meant to be run.

Great job, it's unique!

I am curious if it's possible to adjust this to use more RAM, as i've got a machine with 64GB RAM and 24GB VRAM. Or perhaps I could run Gemma/Qwen on the GPU and have GLM-5.2 delegate smaller tasks to it. It might take some retraining of GLM-5.2

I'm also curious if you can speed this up by using many disks in parallel to increase bandwidth.

>SSD Wear Warning

> Cold starts are heavy on random reads (~11 GB/token). Reads themselves are safe, but the OS page cache can generate writes. Heavy use may accelerate wear on cheaper SSDs. Use with caution and monitor your drive health.

Hmm, maybe a safe way to do this would be to make a separate partition for the model weights, and set them to read-only? Not sure how the page cache works, if it's like per partition or per disk. If it's per disk, maybe you could have a read-only data.iso formatted as a partition and mount it as a disk?

The page has an SSD wear warning [0] I use desktop PCs that I build from components so I can replace the SSD, but what do users with soldered SSD do? Just avoid these applications or forge ahead disregarding the possible early burnout of their storage? They must use external storage as the burner SSD.

[0] https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri#ssd-wear-warning

Another recent project that runs a huge model on a 48gb Mac is https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe - it gets over 5 tokens/sec on an M3 Max compared to this projects very impressive 1 token/sec on an M5 Max. So for anyone wanting to tackle a Mac only version that targets lower spec machines this looks like a good candidate with plenty of room for speedups [edit: because it doesn't use the gpu].

Not hijacking anything as this project is amazing.

related and possibly more general purpose https://github.com/t8/hypura

Working on something similar targeting macOS on Apple Silicon, Unsloth split GGUF, compressed partial residency in unified memory (would make more sense on 128GB instead of my 64GB...), native Metal kernels, and RAM-only native compressed KV. Happy to put on GitHub when it's ready.

I love it but where do you find that NVMe SSD for less than the price of an h100 fan let alone the memory

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This is something that would benefit from Intel Optane memory. Too bad it was killed at the time.

I wonder how would a RAID0 array of either disks or even nvme improve the performance of this.

This sort of thing is a lot of fun.

I've been going smaller.. I have a custom-quantized Rust port of DiffusionGemma (26B) that seems to perform better (in responses) than benchmarks seemed to indicate and reasonably fast for its model size. Works really well on a 36GB mac as well for both prefill and generation.

It's been interesting learning about the balance of factors for performant metal kernels on unified memory.

Should have a repo up on github in the next few weeks.