Can I run gpt2 on a NVIDIA A100 (40GB)?

Yes.Runs

You can run this comfortably. On a NVIDIA A100 (40GB) (40 GB VRAM), gpt2 needs about 1.3 GB (FP16) and should generate at roughly ~440 tok/s. Recommended: Run on your GPU with FP16.

openai-community/gpt2

Why

At full precision this model needs ~1.3 GB, which fits your GPU VRAM.

How to run gpt2 on a A100 (40GB)

Serve with vLLM (OpenAI-compatible API)

# Fast production serving on http://localhost:8000/v1
vllm serve openai-community/gpt2

Python (Transformers)

from transformers import pipeline
pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model="openai-community/gpt2", device_map="auto")
print(pipe("Hello", max_new_tokens=50))

Want it to run comfortably at higher precision? The smallest GPU that runs gpt2 well is the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada (48 GB).

Try the full analyzer

gpt2 on other GPUs

RTX 509032 GB VRAM RTX 508016 GB VRAM RTX 5070 Ti16 GB VRAM RTX 507012 GB VRAM RTX 409024 GB VRAM RTX 4080 Super16 GB VRAM

Other models on a A100 (40GB)

Qwen2.5-0.5Bon A100 (40GB)Phi-3-minion A100 (40GB)Qwen2.5-Coderon A100 (40GB)Mistral-7Bon A100 (40GB)Llama-3.1-8Bon A100 (40GB)Gemma-2-9Bon A100 (40GB)