vllm-omni/docs/user_guide/diffusion/parallelism_acceleration.md

Parallelism Acceleration Guide

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): 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 - 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 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.

The following table shows which models are currently supported by parallelism method:

ImageGen

Model	Model Identifier	Ulysses-SP	Ring-SP	CFG-Parallel	Tensor-Parallel
LongCat-Image	meituan-longcat/LongCat-Image	✅	✅	❌	✅
LongCat-Image-Edit	meituan-longcat/LongCat-Image-Edit	✅	✅	❌	✅
Ovis-Image	OvisAI/Ovis-Image	❌	❌	❌	❌
Qwen-Image	Qwen/Qwen-Image	✅	✅	✅	✅
Qwen-Image-Edit	Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit	✅	✅	✅	✅
Qwen-Image-Edit-2509	Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit-2509	✅	✅	✅	✅
Qwen-Image-Layered	Qwen/Qwen-Image-Layered	✅	✅	✅	✅
Z-Image	Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo	✅	✅	❌	✅ (TP=2 only)
Stable-Diffusion3.5	stabilityai/stable-diffusion-3.5	❌	❌	❌	❌
FLUX.2-klein	black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B	❌	❌	❌	✅
FLUX.1-dev	black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev	❌	❌	❌	✅

!!! note "TP Limitations for Diffusion Models" 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).

!!! note "Why Z-Image is TP=2 only" 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.

VideoGen

Model	Model Identifier	Ulysses-SP	Ring-SP	Tensor-Parallel
Wan2.2	Wan-AI/Wan2.2-T2V-A14B-Diffusers	✅	✅	✅

Tensor Parallelism

Tensor parallelism splits model parameters across GPUs. In vLLM-Omni, tensor parallelism is configured via DiffusionParallelConfig.tensor_parallel_size.

Offline Inference

from vllm_omni import Omni
from vllm_omni.diffusion.data import DiffusionParallelConfig

omni = Omni(
    model="Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo",
    parallel_config=DiffusionParallelConfig(tensor_parallel_size=2),
)

outputs = omni.generate(
    "a cat reading a book",
    OmniDiffusionSamplingParams(
        num_inference_steps=9,
        width=512,
        height=512,
    ),
)

Sequence Parallelism

Ulysses-SP

Offline Inference

An example of offline inference script using Ulysses-SP is shown below:

from vllm_omni import Omni
from vllm_omni.inputs.data import OmniDiffusionSamplingParams
from vllm_omni.diffusion.data import DiffusionParallelConfig
ulysses_degree = 2

omni = Omni(
    model="Qwen/Qwen-Image",
    parallel_config=DiffusionParallelConfig(ulysses_degree=2)
)

outputs = omni.generate(
    "A cat sitting on a windowsill",
    OmniDiffusionSamplingParams(num_inference_steps=50, width=2048, height=2048),
)

See examples/offline_inference/text_to_image/text_to_image.py for a complete working example.

Online Serving

You can enable Ulysses-SP in online serving for diffusion models via --usp:

# Text-to-image (requires >= 2 GPUs)
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen-Image --omni --port 8091 --usp 2

Benchmarks

!!! note "Benchmark Disclaimer" 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
Baseline (diffusers)	-	112.5s	1.0x
Ulysses-SP	2	65.2s	1.73x
Ulysses-SP	4	39.6s	2.84x
Ulysses-SP	8	30.8s	3.65x

Ring-Attention

Ring-Attention (arxiv paper) 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:

from vllm_omni import Omni
from vllm_omni.inputs.data import OmniDiffusionSamplingParams
from vllm_omni.diffusion.data import DiffusionParallelConfig
ring_degree = 2

omni = Omni(
    model="Qwen/Qwen-Image",
    parallel_config=DiffusionParallelConfig(ring_degree=2)
)

outputs = omni.generate(
    "A cat sitting on a windowsill",
    OmniDiffusionSamplingParams(num_inference_steps=50, width=2048, height=2048),
)

See examples/offline_inference/text_to_image/text_to_image.py for a complete working example.

Online Serving

You can enable Ring-Attention in online serving for diffusion models via --ring:

# Text-to-image (requires >= 2 GPUs)
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen-Image --omni --port 8091 --ring 2

Benchmarks

!!! note "Benchmark Disclaimer" 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
Baseline (diffusers)	-	45.2s	1.0x
Ring-Attention	2	29.9s	1.51x
Ring-Attention	4	23.3s	1.94x

Hybrid Ulysses + Ring

You can combine both Ulysses-SP and Ring-Attention for larger scale parallelism. The total sequence parallel size equals ulysses_degree × ring_degree.

Offline Inference

from vllm_omni import Omni
from vllm_omni.inputs.data import OmniDiffusionSamplingParams
from vllm_omni.diffusion.data import DiffusionParallelConfig

# Hybrid: 2 Ulysses × 2 Ring = 4 GPUs total
omni = Omni(
    model="Qwen/Qwen-Image",
    parallel_config=DiffusionParallelConfig(ulysses_degree=2, ring_degree=2)
)

outputs = omni.generate(
    "A cat sitting on a windowsill",
    OmniDiffusionSamplingParams(num_inference_steps=50, width=2048, height=2048),
)

Online Serving

# Text-to-image (requires >= 4 GPUs)
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen-Image --omni --port 8091 --usp 2 --ring 2

Benchmarks

!!! note "Benchmark Disclaimer" 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
Baseline (diffusers)	-	-	45.2s	1.0x
Hybrid Ulysses + Ring	2	2	24.3s	1.87x

CFG-Parallel

Offline Inference

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.

An example of offline inference using CFG-Parallel (image-to-image) is shown below:

from vllm_omni import Omni
from vllm_omni.diffusion.data import DiffusionParallelConfig

image_path = "path_to_image.png"
omni = Omni(
    model="Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit",
    parallel_config=DiffusionParallelConfig(cfg_parallel_size=2),
)
input_image = Image.open(image_path).convert("RGB")

outputs = omni.generate(
    {
        "prompt": "turn this cat to a dog",
        "negative_prompt": "low quality, blurry",
        "multi_modal_data": {"image": input_image},
    },
    OmniDiffusionSamplingParams(
        true_cfg_scale=4.0,
        num_inference_steps=50,
    ),
)

Notes:

• CFG-Parallel is only effective when a negative_prompt is provided AND a guidance scale (or cfg_scale) is greater than 1.

See examples/offline_inference/image_to_image/image_edit.py for a complete working example.

cd examples/offline_inference/image_to_image/
python image_edit.py \
  --model "Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit" \
  --image "qwen_image_output.png" \
  --prompt "turn this cat to a dog" \
  --negative_prompt "low quality, blurry" \
  --cfg_scale 4.0 \
  --output "edited_image.png" \
  --cfg_parallel_size 2

Online Serving

You can enable CFG-Parallel in online serving for diffusion models via --cfg-parallel-size:

vllm serve Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit --omni --port 8091 --cfg-parallel-size 2