ZSE

I've been building ZSE (Z Server Engine) for the past few weeks — an open-source LLM inference engine focused on two things nobody has fully solved together: memory efficiency and fast cold starts.The problem I was trying to solve: Running a 32B model normally requires ~64 GB VRAM. Most developers don't have that. And even when quantization helps with memory, cold starts with bitsandbytes NF4 take 2+ minutes on first load and 45–120 seconds on warm restarts — which kills serverless and autoscaling use cases.What ZSE does differently:Fits 32B in 19.3 GB VRAM (70% reduction vs FP16) — runs on a single A100-40GBFits 7B in 5.2 GB VRAM (63% reduction) — runs on consumer GPUsNative .zse pre-quantized format with memory-mapped weights: 3.9s cold start for 7B, 21.4s for 32B — vs 45s and 120s with bitsandbytes, ~30s for vLLMAll benchmarks verified on Modal A100-80GB (Feb 2026)It ships with:OpenAI-compatible API server (drop-in replacement)Interactive CLI (zse serve, zse chat, zse convert, zse hardware)Web dashboard with real-time GPU monitoringContinuous batching (3.45× throughput)GGUF support via llama.cppCPU fallback — works without a GPURate limiting, audit logging, API key authInstall:----- pip install zllm-zse zse serve Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct For fast cold starts (one-time conversion):----- zse convert Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct -o qwen-7b.zse zse serve qwen-7b.zse # 3.9s every timeThe cold start improvement comes from the .zse format storing pre-quantized weights as memory-mapped safetensors — no quantization step at load time, no weight conversion, just mmap + GPU transfer. On NVMe SSDs this gets under 4 seconds for 7B. On spinning HDDs it'll be slower.All code is real — no mock implementations. Built at Zyora Labs. Apache 2.0.Happy to answer questions about the quantization approach, the .zse format design, or the memory efficiency techniques.