[zozbot234]

DwarfStar and other end-user inference engines should also support batched/concurrent inference IMHO. Not so much for the overly naïve "serving multiple users" case (the local hardware cannot really compete with ordinary datacenter gear, much less with the big proprietary suppliers; the compute headroom is too small to begin with once the model is in RAM) but rather to improve SSD streamed decode in the unattended inference scenario, where the goal is to meaningfully raise aggregate tok/s whilst facing an overly tight constraint on disk bandwidth, and CPU/GPU compute have a lot of slack.

Of course this requires wide enough batches to have at least some reuse of fetched experts across a batch, but that seems feasible in the "unattended" case, where firing off multiple inferences to be processed together seems quite natural. (We may also have some benefit from better use of the resident experts cache and/or of SSD transfer bandwidth.)

https://github.com/antirez/ds4/issues/275 seems to provide intriguing rough results while https://github.com/antirez/ds4/issues/314 is a valuable contrast where one commonly suggested solution ("just run multiple instances of the engine in parallel") ran into real issues. Neither of these discuss the combined use of batching and SSD streaming yet, so there's room for experimentation.