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feat(vllm, distributed): tensor parallel distributed workers#9612

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richiejp:feat/vllm-tensor-parallel
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feat(vllm, distributed): tensor parallel distributed workers#9612
richiejp wants to merge 4 commits intomudler:masterfrom
richiejp:feat/vllm-tensor-parallel

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@richiejp richiejp commented Apr 29, 2026

Description

Natively support vLLMs distributed mode in LocalAI's distributed mode.

Notes for Reviewers

  • feat(vllm): build vllm from source for Intel XPU
  • feat(vllm): add multi-node data-parallel follower worker

My ability to test this is limited because I don't have multiple GPUs of the same type. Also the e2e test on CPU needs AVX512 so it can't be trusted on GH CI workers.

Signed commits

  • Yes, I signed my commits.

@richiejp richiejp force-pushed the feat/vllm-tensor-parallel branch 2 times, most recently from ef3e063 to d3d4671 Compare April 30, 2026 09:05
@richiejp richiejp marked this pull request as ready for review April 30, 2026 10:02
@richiejp richiejp force-pushed the feat/vllm-tensor-parallel branch from 95094e3 to b9667dd Compare April 30, 2026 10:03
Upstream publishes no XPU wheels for vllm. The Intel profile was
silently picking up a non-XPU wheel that imported but errored at
engine init, and several runtime deps (pillow, charset-normalizer,
chardet) were missing on Intel -- backend.py crashed at import time
before the gRPC server came up.

Switch the Intel profile to upstream's documented from-source
procedure (docs/getting_started/installation/gpu.xpu.inc.md in
vllm-project/vllm):

  - Bump portable Python to 3.12 -- vllm-xpu-kernels ships only a
    cp312 wheel.
  - Source /opt/intel/oneapi/setvars.sh so vllm's CMake build sees
    the dpcpp/sycl compiler from the oneapi-basekit base image.
  - Hide requirements-intel-after.txt during installRequirements
    (it used to 'pip install vllm'); install vllm's deps from a
    fresh git clone of vllm via 'uv pip install -r
    requirements/xpu.txt', swap stock triton for
    triton-xpu==3.7.0, then 'VLLM_TARGET_DEVICE=xpu uv pip install
    --no-deps .'.
  - requirements-intel.txt trimmed to LocalAI's direct deps
    (accelerate / transformers / bitsandbytes); torch-xpu, vllm,
    vllm_xpu_kernels and the rest come from upstream's xpu.txt
    during the source build.
  - requirements.txt: add pillow + charset-normalizer + chardet --
    used by backend.py and missing on the Intel install profile.
  - run.sh: 'set -x' so backend startup is visible in container
    logs (the gRPC startup error path was previously opaque).

Also adds a one-line docs example for engine_args.attention_backend
under the vLLM section, since older XE-HPG GPUs (e.g. Arc A770)
need TRITON_ATTN to bypass the cutlass path in vllm_xpu_kernels.

Tested end-to-end on an Intel Arc A770 with Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct
via LocalAI's /v1/chat/completions.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
@richiejp richiejp force-pushed the feat/vllm-tensor-parallel branch 2 times, most recently from 41d853a to c43b3b5 Compare April 30, 2026 10:10
vLLM v1's multi-node story is one process per node sharing a DP
coordinator over ZMQ -- the head runs the API server with
data_parallel_size > 1 and followers run `vllm serve --headless ...`
with matching topology. Today LocalAI can already configure DP on the
head via the engine_args YAML map, but there's no way to bring up the
follower nodes -- so the head sits waiting for ranks that never
handshake.

Add `local-ai p2p-worker vllm`, mirroring MLXDistributed's structural
precedent (operator-launched, static config, no NATS placement). The
worker:

  - Optionally self-registers with the frontend as an agent-type node
    tagged `node.role=vllm-follower` so it's visible in the admin UI
    and operators can scope ordinary models away via inverse
    selectors.
  - Resolves the platform-specific vllm backend via the gallery's
    "vllm" meta-entry (cuda*, intel-vllm, rocm-vllm, ...).
  - Runs vLLM as a child process so the heartbeat goroutine survives
    until vLLM exits; forwards SIGINT/SIGTERM so vLLM can clean up its
    ZMQ sockets before we tear down.
  - Validates --headless + --start-rank 0 is rejected (rank 0 is the
    head and must serve the API).

Backend run.sh dispatches `serve` as the first arg to vllm's own CLI
instead of LocalAI's backend.py gRPC server -- the follower speaks
ZMQ directly to the head, there is no LocalAI gRPC on the follower
side. Single-node usage is unchanged.

Generalises the gallery resolution helper into findBackendPath()
shared by MLX and vLLM workers; extracts ParseNodeLabels for the
comma-separated label parsing both use.

Ships with two compose recipes (`docker-compose.vllm-multinode.yaml`
for NVIDIA, `docker-compose.vllm-multinode.intel.yaml` for Intel
XPU/xccl) plus `tests/e2e/vllm-multinode/smoke.sh`. Both vendors are
supported (NCCL for CUDA/ROCm, xccl for XPU) but mixed-vendor DP is
not -- PyTorch's process group requires every rank to use the same
collective backend, and NCCL/xccl/gloo don't interoperate.

Out of scope (deferred): SmartRouter-driven placement of follower
ranks via NATS backend.install events, follower log streaming through
/api/backend-logs, tensor-parallel across nodes, disaggregated
prefill via KVTransferConfig.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
Adds tests/e2e/vllm-multinode/, a Ginkgo + testcontainers-go suite
that brings up a head + headless follower from the locally-built
local-ai:tests image, bind-mounts the cpu-vllm backend extracted by
make extract-backend-vllm so it's seen as a system backend (no gallery
fetch, no registry server), and asserts a chat completion across both
DP ranks. New `make test-e2e-vllm-multinode` target wires the docker
build, backend extract, and ginkgo run together; BuildKit caches both
images so re-runs only rebuild what changed. Tagged Label("VLLMMultinode")
so the existing distributed suite isn't pulled along.

Two pre-existing bugs surfaced by the test:

1. extract-backend-% (Makefile) failed for every backend, because all
   backend images end with `FROM scratch` and `docker create` rejects
   an image with no CMD/ENTRYPOINT. Fixed by passing
   --entrypoint=/run.sh -- the container is never started, only
   docker-cp'd, so the path doesn't have to exist; we just need
   anything that satisfies the daemon's create-time validation.

2. backend/python/vllm/run.sh's `serve` shortcut for the multi-node DP
   follower exec'd ${EDIR}/venv/bin/vllm directly, but uv bakes an
   absolute build-time shebang (`#!/vllm/venv/bin/python3`) that no
   longer resolves once the backend is relocated to BackendsPath.
   _makeVenvPortable's shebang rewriter only matches paths that
   already point at ${EDIR}, so the original shebang slips through
   unchanged. Fixed by exec-ing ${EDIR}/venv/bin/python with the script
   as an argument -- Python ignores the script's shebang in that case.

The test fixture caps memory aggressively (max_model_len=512,
VLLM_CPU_KVCACHE_SPACE=1, TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE=1) so two CPU engines
fit on a 32 GB box. TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE is currently mandatory for
cpu-vllm: torch._inductor's CPU-ISA probe runs even with
enforce_eager=True and needs g++ on PATH, which the LocalAI runtime
image doesn't ship -- to be addressed in a follow-up that bundles a
toolchain in the cpu-vllm backend.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
torch._inductor's CPU-ISA probe (`cpu_model_runner.py:65 "Warming up
model for the compilation"`) shells out to `g++` at vllm engine
startup, regardless of `enforce_eager=True` -- the eager flag only
disables CUDA graphs, not inductor's first-batch warmup. The LocalAI
CPU runtime image (Dockerfile, unconditional apt list) does not ship
build-essential, and the cpu-vllm backend image is `FROM scratch`,
so any non-trivial inference on cpu-vllm crashes with:

  torch._inductor.exc.InductorError:
    InvalidCxxCompiler: No working C++ compiler found in
    torch._inductor.config.cpp.cxx: (None, 'g++')

Bundling the toolchain in the CPU runtime image would bloat every
non-vllm-CPU deployment and force a single GCC version on backends
that may want clang or a different version. So this lives in the
backend, gated to BUILD_TYPE=='' (the CPU profile).

`package.sh` snapshots g++ + binutils + cc1plus + libstdc++ + libc6
(runtime + dev) + the math libs cc1plus links (libisl/libmpc/libmpfr/
libjansson) into ${BACKEND}/toolchain/, mirroring /usr/... layout. The
unversioned binaries on Debian/Ubuntu are symlink chains pointing into
multiarch packages (`g++` -> `g++-13` -> `x86_64-linux-gnu-g++-13`,
the latter in `g++-13-x86-64-linux-gnu`), so the package list resolves
both the version and the arch-triplet variant. Symlinks /lib ->
usr/lib and /lib64 -> usr/lib64 are recreated under the toolchain
root because Ubuntu's UsrMerge keeps them at /, and ld scripts
(`libc.so`, `libm.so`) hardcode `/lib/...` paths that --sysroot
re-roots into the toolchain.

The unversioned `g++`/`gcc`/`cpp` symlinks are replaced with wrapper
shell scripts that resolve their own location at runtime and pass
`--sysroot=<toolchain>` and `-B <toolchain>/usr/lib/gcc/<triplet>/<ver>/`
to the underlying versioned binary. That's how torch's bare `g++ foo.cpp
-o foo` invocation finds cc1plus (-B), system headers (--sysroot), and
the bundled libstdc++ (--sysroot, --sysroot is recursive into linker).

`run.sh` adds the toolchain bin dir to PATH and the toolchain's
shared-lib dir to LD_LIBRARY_PATH -- everything else (header search,
linker search, executable search) is encapsulated in the wrappers.
No-op for non-CPU builds, the dir doesn't exist there.

The cpu-vllm image grows by ~217 MB. Tradeoff is acceptable -- cpu-vllm
is already a niche profile (few users compared to GPU vllm) and the
alternative is a backend that crashes at first inference unless the
operator manually sets TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE=1, which silently disables
all torch.compile optimizations.

Drops `TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE=1` from tests/e2e/vllm-multinode -- the
smoke now exercises the real compile path through the bundled toolchain.
Test runtime is +20s for the warmup compile, still <90s end to end.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
@richiejp richiejp force-pushed the feat/vllm-tensor-parallel branch from c43b3b5 to 225e051 Compare April 30, 2026 10:12
@mudler mudler self-assigned this Apr 30, 2026
@mudler mudler removed their assignment Apr 30, 2026
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