Programming Tutorials

  There is no frustration quite like watching a progress bar crawl for hours as you download terabytes of model weights, only to be greeted by a   RuntimeError: CUDA out of memory   the millisecond you attempt inference. With the release of Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B, the open-source community finally has a model that rivals GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. However, the hardware barrier is immense. Running the 405B parameter model in its native BF16 (bfloat16) precision requires roughly 810 GB of VRAM. That is the equivalent of ten NVIDIA A100 (80GB) GPUs. For most ML engineers and DevOps teams, provisioning an H100 cluster just for experimentation isn't feasible. The solution lies in aggressive quantization. This guide details how to leverage FP8 and 4-bit quantization (specifically NF4 via  bitsandbytes ) to fit Llama 3.1 405B onto prosumer multi-GPU setups or dense compute nodes, effectively cutting memory requirements by up to 75% while maintaining model fidelity. The Ma...