Layer 6 of 9

Optimization & serving. latency is margin.

Batching turns GPUs into factories.

Production inference piles constraints: tail latency p99, throughput per dollar, VRAM ceilings.

KV caches reuse attention keys across tokens; FlashAttention trades memory for bandwidth-aware tiling.

What this layer does

Toolkit

Continuous batching absorbs uneven prompts; speculative decoding drafts tokens then verifies cheaply.

Efficient servers coordinate paging across GPUs — Deadwood abstracts vendor knobs.

The problem without Deadwood

Without custodianship, your team inherits every sharp edge below.

  • Profile CUDA kernels yourself.
  • Negotiate bespoke kernels with contractors.
  • Resize fleets manually when campaigns spike.

Typical DIY cost

Timeline
evergreen tuning
Budget
$75k–$400k/yr infra drag
Expertise
Performance + finance analysts

Deadwood's solution

Opinionated APIs wire custodied data, runners, and proofs together — no boilerplate archaeology.

from deadwood import InferenceServer

server = InferenceServer(
    model="mistral-7b-lora-finance",
    optimization="auto",
    target_latency_ms=100,
    target_rps=1000,
)

results = server.batch_inference(requests)

How Deadwood custodies this layer

InferenceServer negotiates batch sizes, cache tiers, and quantization passes until telemetry satisfies SLAs.

Cost dashboards tie millisecond regressions to ledger lines — finance sees ops impact instantly.

Benchmarks / proof

OptimizationSpeedupCost / VRAM
Stock PyTorchbaseline
+ batching≈8×
+ KV and flash kernels≈3×lower VRAM
+ int8 quant≈2.5×−50% VRAM
Deadwood stack15–20×≈70% savings

Illustrative geometric means — actual uplift depends on sequence lengths.

Next steps

Continue the tour

Follow how custody chains into Evaluation & verification.

Next: Evaluation & verification

Run a workload

Provision runners and metered jobs — describe the outcome, not every knob.

Start a job

Talk to custodians

White-glove onboarding for regulated teams and bespoke stacks.

Schedule a demo