Coding agents: skip this README and read AGENTS.md directly.
Flare is a local inference server for NVIDIA SM120/SM121 GPUs, built for long conversations, coding agents, and repeated tool use. Its goal is to make the memory, bandwidth, and compute in workstations and compact systems such as DGX Spark go further, while keeping generation responsive.
This is a research prototype, and is made available via open-source to enable technical collaboration and collect early feedback.
The design rests on a few principles:
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Embrace the standard PyTorch ecosystem at build time; serve from Rust. Ignition uses PyTorch, Transformers, and FlashInfer/b12x to load models, tune kernels, compile forwards, and capture CUDA graphs into a runtime package. Helios, the Rust runtime, serves that package without Python. Compilation and graph capture finish before serving.
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Build on the model ecosystem. Reuse canonical model implementations wherever their dataflow fits, and specialize the parts that need different layouts or execution. Model development keeps the tools and libraries that make the Python ecosystem productive.
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Make memory and state explicit. Plan buffers and execution capacities ahead of time. Treat conversation state—including recurrent state alongside KV caches—as a whole, so reuse, branching, and resuming preserve it correctly.
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Keep the runtime small and shared. Model recipes own model computation; the runtime owns scheduling, cache storage, and request handling. A focused hardware and kernel stack keeps those boundaries manageable.
vLLM covers a much broader range of models, hardware, and deployment patterns. Flare trades that breadth for a focused serving contract around selected models and local workloads. Flare is not, and will never, be a replacement for production inference englines like vLLM.
Think of Flare as a specialized option when its hardware and model coverage fit your machine.
Start with model preparation and serving. See the CLI guide for configuration and the core design for the architectural reasoning.