Spaces ZeroGPU: Dynamic GPU Allocation for Spaces

ZeroGPU schema

ZeroGPU is a shared infrastructure that optimizes GPU usage for AI models and demos on Hugging Face Spaces. It dynamically allocates and releases NVIDIA H200 GPUs as needed, offering:

  1. Free GPU Access: Enables cost-effective GPU usage for Spaces.
  2. Multi-GPU Support: Allows Spaces to leverage multiple GPUs concurrently on a single application.

Unlike traditional single-GPU allocations, ZeroGPU’s efficient system lowers barriers for developers, researchers, and organizations to deploy AI models by maximizing resource utilization and power efficiency.

Using and hosting ZeroGPU Spaces

Technical Specifications

Compatibility

ZeroGPU Spaces are designed to be compatible with most PyTorch-based GPU Spaces. While compatibility is enhanced for high-level Hugging Face libraries like transformers and diffusers, users should be aware that:

Supported Versions

Getting started with ZeroGPU

To utilize ZeroGPU in your Space, follow these steps:

  1. Make sure the ZeroGPU hardware is selected in your Space settings.
  2. Import the spaces module.
  3. Decorate GPU-dependent functions with @spaces.GPU.

This decoration process allows the Space to request a GPU when the function is called and release it upon completion.

Example Usage

import spaces
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline

pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(...)
pipe.to('cuda')

@spaces.GPU
def generate(prompt):
    return pipe(prompt).images

gr.Interface(
    fn=generate,
    inputs=gr.Text(),
    outputs=gr.Gallery(),
).launch()

Note: The @spaces.GPU decorator is designed to be effect-free in non-ZeroGPU environments, ensuring compatibility across different setups.

Duration Management

For functions expected to exceed the default 60-second of GPU runtime, you can specify a custom duration:

@spaces.GPU(duration=120)
def generate(prompt):
   return pipe(prompt).images

This sets the maximum function runtime to 120 seconds. Specifying shorter durations for quicker functions will improve queue priority for Space visitors.

Dynamic duration

@spaces.GPU also supports dynamic durations.

Instead of directly passing a duration, simply pass a callable that takes the same inputs as your decorated function and returns a duration value:

def get_duration(prompt, steps):
    step_duration = 3.75
    return steps * step_duration

@spaces.GPU(duration=get_duration)
def generate(prompt, steps):
   return pipe(prompt, num_inference_steps=steps).images

Compilation

ZeroGPU does not support torch.compile, but you can use PyTorch ahead-of-time compilation (requires torch 2.8+)

Check out this blogpost for a complete guide on ahead-of-time compilation on ZeroGPU.

Hosting Limitations

By leveraging ZeroGPU, developers can create more efficient and scalable Spaces, maximizing GPU utilization while minimizing costs.

Recommendations

If your demo uses a large model, we recommend using optimizations like ahead-of-time compilation and flash-attention 3. You can learn how to leverage these with ZeroGPU in this post. These optimizations will help you to maximize the advantages of ZeroGPU hours and provide a better user experience.

Feedback

You can share your feedback on Spaces ZeroGPU directly on the HF Hub: https://huggingface.co/spaces/zero-gpu-explorers/README/discussions

Update on GitHub