← Glossary Term
vLLM
The most widely used open source server for running a downloaded model efficiently, especially when many people query it at once.
Downloading a model’s weights is one thing, serving them quickly to lots of users is another. vLLM is free software that sits between the weights and your application: it loads the model, batches incoming requests together, manages GPU memory carefully, and exposes an interface that imitates OpenAI’s API, so existing tools work against it unchanged.
If you read a model card that says “we recommend using this model with vLLM”, this is what it means. The main alternatives are SGLang, which competes on similar ground, and llama.cpp, which targets small machines and laptops rather than servers.
Mentioned in
-
A 2.5 Billion Parameter Model That Beats Bigger Ones, and Runs on Your Laptop
-
K2 Horizon Ships Six Open Models, and the Training Data With Them
-
DeepSeek Opens Up a 305 Billion Parameter Model That Can Finally See
-
Meta Put a 30B Model on Your Laptop, and Zuckerberg Used the Launch to Pick a Fight
-
Someone got DeepSeek V4 Flash running in production on a single AMD card and published every patch it took