howtospark
models / deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash

763B params~228B activefp8MoE 384×6GQA 64:1MTP ×31.0M ctxmultimodalmit
Sparks
~774 GB
~392 GB
~230 GB
~366 GB
~256 GB
110 usable
REAP dialno pruning · 384 experts
Spec decode
Context33K / 1.0MKV
On the Sparks — 1× · 1-bit GGUF (dynamic) · 33K ctx · FP16 KV~0 ctx fits usable
spark
Dense weights63.1* GB2.3-bit
Expert planes156.3* GB2.3-bit
110 usable
+120 over
230* / 110 GB
209% of usable
Expert planesDense weightsKV cacheActivations + graphsOS reserve

* segment sizes marked with an asterisk are estimates pending a measured run

Estimated per-node footprint, weights + KV sharded across the Spark (tensor parallel). Overhead ~8 GB/node; KV at FP16.

layer map
40 layersMoE FFN
in
out

one MoE layer · 384 experts, 6+1 fire per token · showing 256

each expert ≈ 35M params

resident: 40 MoE layers × 384 experts × 35M 543.6B

active/token: 40 × 6 × 35M 8.5B experts

+ 219.6B always-on dense (attention, embeddings, shared stack) = 228.1B active

Optimize
Verdict

763B params, ~763 GB at already fp8-quantized and still ~382 GB at 4-bit — one Spark can't hold it; you need surgery or more Sparks.

Make it fit

Get the weights (and headroom for KV) inside the 128 GB pool — the hard gate.

Prune experts (then quantize)

With 384 routed experts and only 6 firing per token, REAP-style pruning cuts total params without touching active compute (params include vision/audio towers).

pruning to half the experts ≈ halves the routed-expert weights, ~210 GB at 4-bit

Split or stream it

Even 4-bit is ~382 GB against a 110 GB usable budget; shard across ≥4 Sparks or stream cold weights from NVMe.

Go below 4 bits

Codebook/outlier methods reach 2–3 bpw when 4-bit still overflows. — for MoE, the proven shape is a 2-bit sign-symmetric codebook on the routed experts with the dense stack kept at FP8 (vLLM-Moet).

~356 GB with 2-bit experts + FP8 dense (est.)

Make it fast

Once it fits: fewer bytes per token and fewer decode steps against 273 GB/s.

Use its MTP heads

Ships 3 multi-token-prediction layer(s) — self-speculative decode with no separate draft model; check vLLM/SGLang support for this arch.

Make it yours

Change what the model does — adapt, edit, or steer it — independent of size.

Fine-tune it

LoRA/QLoRA adapts behavior on one Spark without touching the base weights.