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vLLM

High-throughput inference server with an OpenAI-compatible API

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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 GPUPaged 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 itMost 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 haveuv pip install vllm installs 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 cardQuantized 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 callsStructured output generation runs through xgrammar or guidance, 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

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