
vLLM
High-throughput inference server with an OpenAI-compatible API
Overview
Paged attention and continuous batching let one GPU serve far more concurrent requests than a naive loop, which matters because agents are unusually chatty. The OpenAI-compatible endpoint means most agent frameworks point at it with a base-URL change. Expect real operational work around GPU memory sizing and model loading times.
What can you do with vLLM?
- Serve more concurrent agents per GPU — Paged attention and continuous batching keep many requests in flight on a single card instead of running them through a naive one-at-a-time loop.
- Point existing clients at it — Most agent frameworks switch over to the OpenAI-compatible API server with a base-URL change and no client rewrite, and the same server also speaks the Anthropic Messages API and gRPC.
- Run it on the hardware you have —
uv pip install vllminstalls the server, which runs on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs and on x86/ARM/PowerPC CPUs, with hardware plugins covering Google TPUs, Intel Gaudi, Huawei Ascend and Apple Silicon. - Shrink a model to fit the card — Quantized weights are served directly — FP8, MXFP8/MXFP4, NVFP4, INT8, INT4, GPTQ/AWQ, GGUF and compressed-tensors are all on the supported list — so the memory a model needs is something you choose rather than a fixed property of the checkpoint.
- Constrain output and parse tool calls — Structured output generation runs through
xgrammarorguidance, and the server ships tool-calling and reasoning parsers for the models that emit them.
Documentation
Reproduced from the vllm-project/vllm README, published under Apache-2.0. Read the original ↗
🔥 We have built a vLLM website to help you get started with vLLM. Please visit vllm.ai to learn more. For events, please visit vllm.ai/events to join us.
About
vLLM is a fast and easy-to-use library for LLM inference and serving.
Originally developed in the Sky Computing Lab at UC Berkeley, vLLM has grown into one of the most active open-source AI projects built and maintained by a diverse community of many dozens of academic institutions and companies from over 2000 contributors.
vLLM is fast with:
- State-of-the-art serving throughput
- Efficient management of attention key and value memory with PagedAttention
- Continuous batching of incoming requests, chunked prefill, prefix caching
- Fast and flexible model execution with piecewise and full CUDA/HIP graphs
- Quantization: FP8, MXFP8/MXFP4, NVFP4, INT8, INT4, GPTQ/AWQ, GGUF, compressed-tensors, ModelOpt, TorchAO, and more
- Optimized attention kernels including FlashAttention, FlashInfer, TRTLLM-GEN, FlashMLA, and Triton
- Optimized GEMM/MoE kernels for various precisions using CUTLASS, TRTLLM-GEN, CuTeDSL
- Speculative decoding including n-gram, suffix, EAGLE, DFlash
- Automatic kernel generation and graph-level transformations using torch.compile
- Disaggregated prefill, decode, and encode
vLLM is flexible and easy to use with:
- Seamless integration with popular Hugging Face models
- High-throughput serving with various decoding algorithms, including parallel sampling, beam search, and more
- Tensor, pipeline, data, expert, and context parallelism for distributed inference
- Streaming outputs
- Generation of structured outputs using xgrammar or guidance
- Tool calling and reasoning parsers
- OpenAI-compatible API server, plus Anthropic Messages API and gRPC support
- Efficient multi-LoRA support for dense and MoE layers
- Support for NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, Intel GPUs, and x86/ARM/PowerPC CPUs. Additionally, diverse hardware plugins such as Google TPUs, Intel Gaudi, IBM Spyre, Huawei Ascend, Rebellions NPU, Apple Silicon, MetaX GPU, and more.
vLLM seamlessly supports 200+ model architectures on Hugging Face, including:
- Decoder-only LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen, Gemma)
- Mixture-of-Expert LLMs (e.g., Mixtral, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-MoE, GPT-OSS)
- Hybrid attention and state-space models (e.g., Mamba, Qwen3.5)
- Multi-modal models (e.g., LLaVA, Qwen-VL, Pixtral)
- Embedding and retrieval models (e.g., E5-Mistral, GTE, ColBERT)
- Reward and classification models (e.g., Qwen-Math)
Find the full list of supported models here.
Getting Started
Install vLLM with uv (recommended) or pip:
uv pip install vllm
Or build from source for development.
Visit our documentation to learn more.
Contact Us
- For technical questions and feature requests, please use GitHub Issues
- For discussing with fellow users, please use the vLLM Forum
- For coordinating contributions and development, please use Slack
- For security disclosures, please use GitHub’s Security Advisories feature
- For collaborations and partnerships, please contact us at collaboration@vllm.ai
Media Kit
- If you wish to use vLLM’s logo, please refer to our media kit repo