Currently, the KV cache and graph are lazily allocated as needed.
The cache is fully allocated on first use of the corresponding
layer whereas the graph grows with the size of the context.
This can be an issue if another application allocates more VRAM
after we do our calculations - Ollama will crash in the middle of
inference. If we instead allocate the maximum needed memory at
startup of the runner, we will either succeed or fail at that point
rather than at some surprising time in the future.
Currently, this only generates a worst case batch for text, which
means that vision models may get a partial allocation and continue
to lazily allocate the rest.
Mistral is a popular research lab making open source models. This updates
the forward pass of llama architecture models to support both llama models
and mistral models by accounting for additional metadata present in mistral
models, and finding the correct dimensions for the output projection.
The sliding window cache trims entries that are outside the window for
the latest token. This works when we are extending the cache, such as
when the conversation continues. However, if we have a partial overlap
in conversation (including the BOS tokens), then we resume from a past
point in the conversation and the needed tokens are no longer stored
in memory. This verifies that the new window overlaps with the old one
before reusing the cache.
Co-authored-by: Jesse Gross <jesse@ollama.com>
Model implementations should use Input for all of their tensors
supplied to the model. This includes tensors that relate to the
outputs, which is confusing since there is also an Output funciton.
Since Output is only used internally in GGML and not used by any
model implementations, we can remove it from the interface to
reduce confusion.
Currently sliding window attention allocates and uses the full
context size and just masks out any tokens that are outside of the
window. However, we really only need (roughly) the sliding window
size.
At large context sizes this improves two things:
- Memory allocated - since the fully context size is allocated up front,
memory requirements drop substantially. On Gemma3:4b with a 32k
context window, total memory usage (including weights and non-sliding
layers) drops from ~20GB to ~8GB.
- Computation - ranges that are completely outside of the sliding
window are now removed from the tensors that are returned from the
cache rather than simply being masked out. This results in more
efficient processing, scaling with the size of the context that
has actually been used.
Notable, this does not update the scheduler for any model to be aware of
the smaller memory requirements. This is difficult for Gemma3 because
the layers are heterogeneous between sliding and non-sliding attention.
As a result, while actual memory consumption will be reduced, the
scheduler will over-estimate the requirements of the model. This means
that splitting between GPUs or GPUs and CPUs will still be suboptimal.
Bug #9730
Currently the runner computes the kv size needed and creates a
cache of that size. This is the context size times number of
parallel sequences.
Cache implementations can make better decisions about their memory
usage, so instead pass in the required capacity, number of sequences
and maximum batch size. For now, the causal cache just uses this to
compute the size in the same way as before.
The encoder cache needs to know the position of images in the input
stream so that it knows when to delete them. Previously images didn't
have a position, so we implied one by breaking batches before an
image and then assuming the image was in the first position. However,
multimodal objects are now given explicit positions in the input
stream, so we can use that instead.
Breaking batches was also a way to simulate a cross attention mask
for mllama. However, given that it only supports a single sequence
and a single image, this mask doesn't serve any real purpose.
Removing the batch break does not appear to affect the quality of
the output.
Most of this is simply moving the input data structures to a new
package to avoid import cycles.
update Context.Forward to accept multiple tensors to match
Context.Compute signature
update Context.Forward to return Context such that it can be chained
with Context.Compute
This provides integration with the new Ollama engine
(5824541 next ollama runner (#7913)) and the rest of the Ollama
infrastructure such as the runner and Ollama server.
In addition, it also builds out the KV cache infrastructure to
support requirements of how Ollama runs models such as:
- Parallel processing
- Memory management for defragmentation and shifting
- Multi-modal modals
Both old and new engines continue to be supported. By default, only
the old engine is used. To enable the new engine:
Start the server with the OLLAMA_NEW_ENGINE environment variable set:
OLLAMA_NEW_ENGINE=1 ./ollama serve
Start a model that is supported by the Ollama engine. This one is Llama 3.1 8b Q4_K_M:
./ollama run jessegross/llama3.1
