DeepSeek Open-Sources Its High-Performance Inference Engine
DeepSeek has officially open-sourced its high-throughput, low-latency inference engine, designed to power large-scale services like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. The engine achieves exceptional performance, such as single-cluster throughput reaching 155 trillion tokens per day. This release significantly impacts the AI landscape by providing developers worldwide with advanced infrastructure to lower deployment costs and optimize performance. It challenges proprietary models and services from Western frontier labs, escalating competition in the AI ecosystem. The inference engine supports advanced features like retaining KV-cache for more than 72 hours and was inspired by popular frameworks like vLLM and SGLang. Performance metrics indicate an off-peak revenue efficiency of roughly $38 per card per hour.
## BACKGROUND
Large language model (LLM) inference engines are specialized software systems responsible for running trained models to generate responses efficiently. High-throughput and low-latency optimizations are crucial for reducing operational costs and providing real-time user experiences at scale.