Qwen3-8B

Introduction

Qwen3-8B is a compact dense model in the Qwen3 series developed by Alibaba, featuring 8B parameters with Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) and up to 128k context length. It delivers significant improvements in instruction following, logical reasoning, text comprehension, mathematics, science, coding, and tool usage. The model supports EAGLE3 speculative decoding for accelerated inference and is available in both standard and thinking/reasoning-enhanced editions.

This document demonstrates the deployment of Qwen3-8B on Ascend NPUs using SGLang, including single-node PD mixed mode, feature configuration, and performance optimization.

This document is validated and written based on SGLang v0.5.13. The current model (Qwen3-8B) is fully supported in this version. To use the latest features (e.g., speculative decoding), it is recommended to use v0.5.13 or a later version.

Supported features

Feature	Example usage
Tensor Parallelism	--tp-size 2
Quantization	--quantization modelslim
Chunked Prefill	auto based on device memory, or set explicit value; disable with --chunked-prefill-size -1; e.g., --chunked-prefill-size 8192
NPU Graph	enabled by default; disable with --disable-cuda-graph; control range via --cuda-graph-bs or --cuda-graph-max-bs-decode; e.g., --cuda-graph-bs 1 2 4 6 9 10 15 16
Speculative Decoding	--speculative-algorithm EAGLE3 \ --speculative-draft-model-path /path/to/draft-model-weights \ --speculative-num-steps 3 \ --speculative-eagle-topk 1 \ --speculative-num-draft-tokens 4 \ --speculative-draft-model-quantization unquant
Overlap Schedule	export SGLANG_ENABLE_OVERLAP_PLAN_STREAM=1

The values in the Example usage column are for illustration only. Adjust them according to your hardware, deployment mode, and workload. For parameter details, see Feature descriptions; for recommended configurations for each deployment scenario, see Best practices.

For feature compatibility and conflict information between features, see Feature Compatibility.

Prerequisites

Environment

Before following this tutorial, complete the environment setup in the documents below:

• Ascend NPU Quickstart — the fastest way to get started. It walks you through launching the official container image, starting the SGLang server, and sending a test request. Recommended if you are new to SGLang on Ascend.
• SGLang Installation with NPU Support — the full installation guide. It covers the component version mapping (CANN, TorchNPU, Triton, kernels, etc.), building from source or from a Dockerfile, and recommended system settings (CPU power scheme, NUMA, swap). Use it when you need to install or customize the environment instead of using the official image.

Model weights

Before downloading model weights, check the model size to reserve enough disk space. For multi-node deployment, download the weights to a shared directory accessible to all nodes.

• Qwen3-8B (BF16, 16.40GB)
• Qwen3-8B-W8A8 (W8A8 quantized version, 11.27GB)
• Eagle3-Qwen3-8B-zh (EAGLE3 draft model for speculative decoding)

We recommend deploying the W8A8 variant for reduced resource usage and higher throughput. It (11.27GB) fits within a single 64GB die, so --tp-size 1 is sufficient on either A2 or A3.

This is the minimum recommended configuration. For optimized configurations, see Best practices, which may require additional cards or nodes.

For the hardware specifications (memory per die, dies per card, and the difference between A2 and A3), see Ascend NPU Reference — Hardware.

Installation

Ensure sufficient disk space before pulling images. The Docker image requires at least 30GB of free space.

The dependencies required for the NPU runtime environment have been integrated into a Docker image and uploaded to the online platform. You can directly pull it.

Both stable releases and daily builds are available. The following command is based on the stable release tag. For details, see Docker image versions.

Atlas 800I A3

Command

docker pull quay.io/ascend/sglang:v0.5.13.post1-cann9.0.0-a3

docker run -itd --shm-size=16g --name ${NAME} \
--privileged=true --net=host \
-v /var/queue_schedule:/var/queue_schedule \
-v /etc/ascend_install.info:/etc/ascend_install.info \
-v /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/sbin \
-v /usr/local/Ascend/driver:/usr/local/Ascend/driver \
-v /usr/local/Ascend/firmware:/usr/local/Ascend/firmware \
--device=/dev/davinci0:/dev/davinci0  \
--device=/dev/davinci1:/dev/davinci1  \
--device=/dev/davinci2:/dev/davinci2  \
--device=/dev/davinci3:/dev/davinci3  \
--device=/dev/davinci4:/dev/davinci4  \
--device=/dev/davinci5:/dev/davinci5  \
--device=/dev/davinci6:/dev/davinci6  \
--device=/dev/davinci7:/dev/davinci7  \
--device=/dev/davinci8:/dev/davinci8  \
--device=/dev/davinci9:/dev/davinci9  \
--device=/dev/davinci10:/dev/davinci10  \
--device=/dev/davinci11:/dev/davinci11  \
--device=/dev/davinci12:/dev/davinci12  \
--device=/dev/davinci13:/dev/davinci13  \
--device=/dev/davinci14:/dev/davinci14  \
--device=/dev/davinci15:/dev/davinci15  \
--device=/dev/davinci_manager:/dev/davinci_manager \
--device=/dev/hisi_hdc:/dev/hisi_hdc \
--entrypoint=bash \
quay.io/ascend/sglang:v0.5.13.post1-cann9.0.0-a3

Atlas 800I A2

Command

docker pull quay.io/ascend/sglang:v0.5.13.post1-cann9.0.0-910b

docker run -itd --shm-size=16g --name ${NAME} \
--privileged=true --net=host \
-v /var/queue_schedule:/var/queue_schedule \
-v /etc/ascend_install.info:/etc/ascend_install.info \
-v /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/sbin \
-v /usr/local/Ascend/driver:/usr/local/Ascend/driver \
-v /usr/local/Ascend/firmware:/usr/local/Ascend/firmware \
--device=/dev/davinci0:/dev/davinci0  \
--device=/dev/davinci1:/dev/davinci1  \
--device=/dev/davinci2:/dev/davinci2  \
--device=/dev/davinci3:/dev/davinci3  \
--device=/dev/davinci4:/dev/davinci4  \
--device=/dev/davinci5:/dev/davinci5  \
--device=/dev/davinci6:/dev/davinci6  \
--device=/dev/davinci7:/dev/davinci7  \
--device=/dev/davinci_manager:/dev/davinci_manager \
--device=/dev/hisi_hdc:/dev/hisi_hdc \
--entrypoint=bash \
quay.io/ascend/sglang:v0.5.13.post1-cann9.0.0-910b

• If the model weights have already been downloaded to a shared directory, use -v to mount the model path into the container, for example: -v /path/to/models:/models.
• Replace ${NAME} with your own container name or remove --name to use default name.

Online service deployment

Single-node online deployment

Single-node deployment completes both prefill and decode within the same node (PD mixed mode), suitable for scenarios with limited hardware resources. This scenario is already covered in the best practice. For the complete, optimized deployment commands and benchmark data, see Qwen3-8B Best Practice — PD Mixed On A3.

Functional verification

After the service is started, you can invoke the model by sending a prompt:

# ============================================================
# Before running, update the following variables:
#   HOST: the server host address (e.g., localhost)
#   PORT: the server port number (e.g., 6688)
# ============================================================

curl http://${HOST}:${PORT}/generate \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{
        "text": "What is the capital of France?",
        "sampling_params": {
            "max_new_tokens": 64,
            "temperature": 0
        }
    }'

Expected result: an HTTP 200 response with the generated text containing “Paris”.

Once the server prints The server is fired up and ready to roll! in the logs, it is ready to accept requests. For more testing examples (Health Check, Generate, Chat Completions, and port usage guidance), see Testing the Service.

Accuracy evaluation

For accuracy evaluation methods and datasets, see Accuracy Evaluation on Ascend NPU.

Performance

For performance data and benchmark commands, see Performance Testing on Ascend NPU.

Best practices

Best practice configuration reference

For complete optimal configurations with deployment scripts and benchmark commands, see the Qwen3-8B Best Practice page.

Performance tuning

For the full list of supported features, see Supported features. For detailed optimization guidance, see Optimization on Ascend NPU.

FAQ

For common environment, installation, and general parameter issues, please refer to the Ascend NPU FAQ.