DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI GPU Droplets Optimized for Inference: Increasing Throughput at Lower the Cost

DigitalOcean's Inference Optimized Image for AI GPU Droplets offers significant improvements in inference performance and cost efficiency for production-grade large language models like Llama 3.3 70B. This optimized solution incorporates several advanced techniques, including speculative decoding, FP8 quantization, FlashAttention-3, paged attention, concurrent optimization, and prompt caching, which collectively enhance throughput by 143%, reduce time-to-first-token by 40.7%, and lower cost per million tokens by 75% compared to a non-optimized baseline. By effectively utilizing only 2 H100 GPUs instead of 4 for the same workload, the solution reduces infrastructure demands and operational complexity while improving performance. These optimizations allow for smarter resource allocation and better hardware utilization, demonstrating that software configurations can significantly impact GPU efficiency. The Inference Optimized Image is made accessible across various GPU tiers, facilitating the deployment of production-grade inference solutions for teams without extensive GPU systems engineering expertise.