Running DeepSeek-R1 Disaggregated with WideEP on H100s#

Dynamo supports SGLang’s implementation of wide expert parallelism and large scale P/D for DeepSeek-R1! You can read their blog post here for more details. We provide a Dockerfile for this in container/Dockerfile.sglang-wideep and a sample configuration that demonstrates WideEP and P/D disaggregation. To run the exact configuration shown in the blog post, you can view the commands created by the SGLang team here. In this example, we will run 1 prefill worker on 4 H100 nodes and 1 decode worker on 4 H100 nodes (64 total GPUs).

Instructions#

  1. Build the Dynamo container using the latest published dynamo version and stable sglang version. If you want to build from a local dynamo repo, you can add --build-arg BRANCH_TYPE=local to the build command. If you want to build from a remote dynamo repo, you can add --build-arg BRANCH_TYPE=remote to the build command. If you want to use a specific tag for the default sglang version, you can add --build-arg SGLANG_IMAGE_TAG=<tag> to the build command.

Note

Please ensure that you are building this on an AMD64 (x86_64) machine. The correct SGLang image will be selected automatically via the multi-arch manifest.

cd $DYNAMO_ROOT
docker build \
  -f container/Dockerfile.sglang-wideep \
  -t dynamo-wideep \
  --no-cache \
  .

  1. You can run this container on each 8xH100 node using the following command.

Important

We recommend downloading DeepSeek-R1 and then mounting it to the container. You can find the model here

docker run \
    --gpus all \
    -it \
    --rm \
    --network host \
    --volume /PATH_TO_DSR1_MODEL/:/model/ \
    --shm-size=10G \
    --ulimit memlock=-1 \
    --ulimit stack=67108864 \
    --ulimit nofile=65536:65536 \
    --cap-add CAP_SYS_PTRACE \
    --ipc host \
    dynamo-wideep:latest

In each container, you should be in the /sgl-workspace/dynamo/components/backends/sglang directory.

  1. Run the ingress and prefill worker

# run ingress
python3 -m dynamo.frontend --http-port=8000 &
# run prefill worker
python3 -m dynamo.sglang \
  --model-path /model/ \
  --served-model-name deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 \
  --skip-tokenizer-init \
  --disaggregation-mode prefill \
  --disaggregation-transfer-backend nixl \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --disaggregation-bootstrap-port 30001 \
  --dist-init-addr ${HEAD_PREFILL_NODE_IP}:29500 \
  --nnodes 4 \
  --node-rank 0 \
  --tp-size 32 \
  --dp-size 32 \
  --enable-dp-attention \
  --decode-log-interval 1000 \
  --moe-a2a-backend deepep \
  --load-balance-method round_robin \
  --page-size 1 \
  --trust-remote-code \
  --moe-dense-tp-size 1 \
  --enable-dp-lm-head \
  --disable-radix-cache \
  --watchdog-timeout 1000000 \
  --enable-two-batch-overlap \
  --deepep-mode normal \
  --mem-fraction-static 0.85 \
  --deepep-config /configs/deepep.json \
  --ep-num-redundant-experts 32 \
  --ep-dispatch-algorithm dynamic \
  --eplb-algorithm deepseek

On the other prefill node (since this example has 4 total prefill nodes), run the same command but change --node-rank to 1,2, and 3

Important

If you encounter random CPU recv timeout issues during the warm-up phase in multi-GPU or multi-node setups, they are likely caused by DeepGEMM kernel compilation overhead. To avoid these non-deterministic timeouts, it’s strongly recommended to precompile the DeepGEMM kernels before launching the SGLang engine. This ensures all kernels are cached and ready, preventing long initialization delays or distributed timeout errors. To precompile and use cached kernels, please execute the following commands:

# 1. Precompile DeepGEMM kernels
export SGLANG_DG_CACHE_DIR="/configs/dgcache/3p1dcache"
python3 -m sglang.compile_deep_gemm <ServerArgs>

# 2. Launch the engine with the same cache directory
export SGLANG_DG_CACHE_DIR="/configs/dgcache/3p1dcache"
python3 -m dynamo.frontend <ServerArgs>

Note

There’s a known issue where the compile request may fail due to missing bootstrap information, but the kernels are still successfully cached. Using a gradual warm-up phase and enabling caching for FlashInfer (similar to DeepGEMM) can further improve stability and reduce startup time. See https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/issues/9867#issuecomment-3336551174 for more details.

  1. Run the decode worker on the head decode node

python3 -m dynamo.sglang \
  --model-path /model/ \
  --served-model-name deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 \
  --skip-tokenizer-init \
  --disaggregation-mode decode \
  --disaggregation-transfer-backend nixl \
  --disaggregation-bootstrap-port 30001 \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --dist-init-addr ${HEAD_DECODE_NODE_IP}:29500 \
  --nnodes 4 \
  --node-rank 0 \
  --tp-size 32 \
  --dp-size 32 \
  --enable-dp-attention \
  --decode-log-interval 1000 \
  --moe-a2a-backend deepep \
  --prefill-round-robin-balance \
  --page-size 1 \
  --trust-remote-code \
  --moe-dense-tp-size 1 \
  --enable-dp-lm-head \
  --disable-radix-cache \
  --watchdog-timeout 1000000 \
  --enable-two-batch-overlap \
  --deepep-mode low_latency \
  --mem-fraction-static 0.835 \
  --ep-num-redundant-experts 32 \
  --cuda-graph-bs 128

On the other decode nodes (this example has 4 total decode nodes), run the same command but change --node-rank to 1, 2, and 3

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