TurboQuant-Bio, an open toolkit that compresses Evo 2’s weights and attention cache to four bits without calibration data, and serves both through fused kernels, proves near-lossless across perplexity spanning the tree of life, genomic classification, splice-site prediction, gene completion and clinically relevant variant-effect prediction.
Abstract
Evo 2 is the largest openly available genomic foundation model, but its forty billion parameter configuration cannot be loaded onto a single 80 GB accelerator, placing genome-scale analysis beyond most laboratories. We present TurboQuant-Bio, an open toolkit that compresses Evo 2’s weights and attention cache to four bits without calibration data, and serves both through fused kernels. Compression is near-lossless across perplexity spanning the tree of life, genomic classification, splice-site prediction, gene completion and clinically relevant variant-effect prediction. It brings Evo 2 40B onto one 80 GB GPU and Evo 2 7B to its full million-token context within a 40 GB memory budget, an eightfold gain in reachable context. We further show that the released chunked-prefill path is silently incorrect, returning plausible but uncorrelated likelihoods, and derive the block-wise continuation that repairs it: a complete 580-kilobase bacterial genome is now scored in one context in 22 minutes rather than 13.7 hours.
Design rules and a reproducible evaluation protocol are contributed that jointly report quality, memory, and end-to-end speed, and a foundation for automated pipeline search under realistic single-GPU constraints is provided.
Autoregressive LLM inference at long context is bounded by memory bandwidth, not arithmetic throughput, and the binding resource shifts from model weights to the Key-Value (KV) cache as sequence length grows. For Llama-3-70B in BF16, the 140 GB weight footprint exceeds the 80 GB HBM of a single accelerator, and one 128...
Across three decoder architectures on an H100 the authors measure that parse, not copy, holds 64-72% of device-resident decode time; that bounding back-reference chain depth - provable, and costing 0.006% in ratio - moves latency by at most 2.8% and, for the file's own latency spike, provably by nothing at all.
Tensor parallelism is the only lever that improves latency (compression makes per-token latency worse), while compression is the only lever that multiplies capacity per dollar (16.5x, against 1.21x for an eightfold spend on GPUs).
This work validates the engineering feasibility of running industrial-scale trillion-parameter LLM-driven biomedical computing tasks on consumer hardware, establishing a new low-barrier paradigm for AI-powered early stage drug discovery.
Language models can now write GPU kernels that outperform PyTorch, and a question the literature does not: what fraction of a real model's wall clock do such kernels govern?