This guide includes how to use parallelism methods in vLLM-Omni to speed up diffusion model inference as well as reduce the memory requirement on each device.
## Overview
The following parallelism methods are currently supported in vLLM-Omni:
1. DeepSpeed Ulysses Sequence Parallel (DeepSpeed Ulysses-SP) ([arxiv paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14509)): Ulysses-SP splits the input along the sequence dimension and uses all-to-all communication to allow each device to compute only a subset of attention heads.
2. [Ring-Attention](#ring-attention) - splits the input along the sequence dimension and uses ring-based P2P communication to accumulate attention results, keeping the sequence dimension sharded
3. Classifier-Free-Guidance Parallel (CFG-Parallel): CFG-Parallel runs the positive/negative prompts of classifier-free guidance (CFG) on different devices, then merges on a single device to perform the scheduler step.
4. [Tensor Parallelism](#tensor-parallelism): Tensor parallelism shards model weights across devices. This can reduce per-GPU memory usage. Note that for diffusion models we currently shard the majority of layers within the DiT.
5. [VAE Patch Parallelism](#vae-patch-parallelism): VAE patch parallelism shards VAE decode spatially across ranks. This can reduce the peak memory of VAE decode and (depending on resolution and communication overhead) speed up VAE decode.
6. [HSDP](#hsdp): Hybrid Sharded Data Parallel shards model weights across GPUs using PyTorch FSDP2. This reduces per-GPU memory usage, enabling inference of large models on GPUs with limited memory.
7. [Expert Parallel](#expert-parallelism): Expert Parallelism shards the Experts of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layer across multiple devices. During the forward, a gating mechanism routes tokens to their designated experts, necessitating cross-cards communication(all-to-all) to dispatch tokens to the correct ranks and combine the results. This parallelism allows for massive scaling of model parameters without a proportional increase in the computational load per device.
We currently implement Tensor Parallelism (TP) only for the DiT (Diffusion Transformer) blocks. This is because the `text_encoder` component in vLLM-Omni uses the original Transformers implementation, which does not yet support TP.
- Good news: The text_encoder typically has minimal impact on overall inference performance.
- Bad news: When TP is enabled, every TP process retains a full copy of the text_encoder weights, leading to significant GPU memory waste.
We are actively refactoring this design to address this. For details and progress, please refer to [Issue #771](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm-omni/issues/771).
Z-Image Turbo is currently limited to `tensor_parallel_size` of **1 or 2** due to model shape divisibility constraints.
For example, the model has `n_heads=30` and a final projection out dimension of `64`, so valid TP sizes must divide both 30 and 64; the only common divisors are **1 and 2**.
Tensor parallelism splits model parameters across GPUs. In vLLM-Omni, tensor parallelism is configured via `DiffusionParallelConfig.tensor_parallel_size`.
VAE patch parallelism distributes the VAE decode workload across multiple ranks by splitting the latent spatially. It is configured via `DiffusionParallelConfig.vae_patch_parallel_size` and can be combined with other parallelism methods (e.g., TP).
- VAE patch parallelism is currently **enabled only for validated pipelines** (check [ImageGen](#imagegen) and [VideoGen](#videogen) for more information).
- If `vae_patch_parallel_size > 1` is set for a validated pipeline, vLLM-Omni will automatically enable `vae_use_tiling` as a safety gate. (We use `vae_use_tiling` because it indicates the VAE supports diffusers tiling parameters like `tile_latent_min_size` and `tile_overlap_factor`.)
VAE patch parallelism automatically selects between two internal decode methods based on whether diffusers tiling would kick in:
-`_distributed_tiled_decode`: Used when the latent spatial size exceeds `vae.tile_latent_min_size` (i.e., diffusers tiled decode). Each rank decodes a subset of tiles; rank0 gathers and runs the same overlap+blend+stitch logic as diffusers. This matches the single-rank diffusers tiled output.
-`_distributed_patch_decode`: Used when diffusers tiling would not kick in. Each rank decodes a grid patch expanded with a latent-space halo; then rank0 gathers the cropped core patches and stitches them into the full image. This path has no blending and can introduce small numerical differences compared to the non-parallel decode.
`ulysses_mode="advanced_uaa"` is an experimental extension to Ulysses-SP. It lets Ulysses attention handle arbitrary sequence lengths and arbitrary attention head counts without relying on `attention_mask`-based token padding.
In hybrid Ulysses + Ring mode, Ring still requires every rank in the same ring group to observe the same post-Ulysses sequence length. If that condition is not met, vLLM-Omni raises a validation error instead of entering the ring kernel with inconsistent shapes.
To enable the experimental UAA mode explicitly, use a model/configuration that actually requires it. For example, `Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo` has 30 attention heads, so `ulysses_degree=4` requires UAA because 30 is not divisible by 4:
These benchmarks are provided for **general reference only**. The configurations shown use default or common parameter settings and have not been exhaustively optimized for maximum performance. Actual performance may vary based on:
- Specific model and use case
- Hardware configuration
- Careful parameter tuning
- Different inference settings (e.g., number of steps, image resolution)
To measure the parallelism methods, we run benchmarks with **Qwen/Qwen-Image** model generating images (**2048x2048** as long sequence input) with 50 inference steps. The hardware devices are NVIDIA H800 GPUs. `sdpa` is the attention backends.
| Configuration | Ulysses degree |Generation Time | Speedup |
Ring-Attention ([arxiv paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01889)) splits the input along the sequence dimension and uses ring-based P2P communication to accumulate attention results. Unlike Ulysses-SP which uses all-to-all communication, Ring-Attention keeps the sequence dimension sharded throughout the computation and circulates Key/Value blocks through a ring topology.
##### Offline Inference
An example of offline inference script using Ring-Attention is shown below:
These benchmarks are provided for **general reference only**. The configurations shown use default or common parameter settings and have not been exhaustively optimized for maximum performance. Actual performance may vary based on:
- Specific model and use case
- Hardware configuration
- Careful parameter tuning
- Different inference settings (e.g., number of steps, image resolution)
To measure the parallelism methods, we run benchmarks with **Qwen/Qwen-Image** model generating images (**1024x1024** as long sequence input) with 50 inference steps. The hardware devices are NVIDIA A100 GPUs. `flash_attn` is the attention backends.
| Configuration | Ring degree |Generation Time | Speedup |
You can combine both Ulysses-SP and Ring-Attention for larger scale parallelism. The total sequence parallel size equals `ulysses_degree × ring_degree`.
`ulysses_mode="advanced_uaa"` can also be used with hybrid Ulysses + Ring, but this does not remove Ring's shape requirement. Every rank in the same ring group must still have the same post-Ulysses sequence length.
These benchmarks are provided for **general reference only**. The configurations shown use default or common parameter settings and have not been exhaustively optimized for maximum performance. Actual performance may vary based on:
- Specific model and use case
- Hardware configuration
- Careful parameter tuning
- Different inference settings (e.g., number of steps, image resolution)
To measure the parallelism methods, we run benchmarks with **Qwen/Qwen-Image** model generating images (**1024x1024** as long sequence input) with 50 inference steps. The hardware devices are NVIDIA A100 GPUs. `flash_attn` is the attention backends.
| Configuration | Ulysses degree | Ring degree | Generation Time | Speedup |
CFG-Parallel is enabled through `DiffusionParallelConfig(cfg_parallel_size=2)`, which runs one rank for the positive branch and one rank for the negative branch.
HSDP (Hybrid Sharded Data Parallel) shards model weights across GPUs to reduce per-GPU memory usage. This enables inference of large models (e.g., Wan2.2 14B) on GPUs with limited memory.
Unlike Tensor Parallelism which splits computation, HSDP uses PyTorch's FSDP2 to shard and redistribute weights at runtime. Each GPU only holds a fraction of the model weights, and weights are gathered on-demand during forward passes.
#### Configuration
HSDP is configured via `DiffusionParallelConfig`:
| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
|-----------|------|---------|-------------|
| `use_hsdp` | bool | False | Enable HSDP |
| `hsdp_shard_size` | int | -1 | Number of GPUs to shard weights across. -1 = auto (requires other parallelism > 1) |
| `hsdp_replicate_size` | int | 1 | Number of replica groups. Each group holds a full sharded copy |
Unlike Tensor Parallelism which shards every layer's weights, EP only shards the MoE expert MLP blocks. This significantly reduces the memory footprint of MoE models (e.g., HunyuanImage3.0) while maintaining constant dense-equivalent compute efficiency. Expert Parallelism is enabled via `DiffusionParallelConfig.enable_expert_parallel`. And `self.ep = tp * sp * cfg * dp` for now, so at least one of TP/SP/CFG/DP should set when EP enabled.
