Range

Range opens container images and Hugging Face model repos without downloading them first

Range, an open-source (Apache-2.0) personal project by AWS engineer Andrey Grehov, opens a shell in a container image, Hugging Face repository or S3 or HTTP environment and transfers only the bytes a program actually reads. In his EC2 tests, a Python script read one tensor of the 1.03 TB Kimi K2 in 3.4 seconds while moving 9.5 MB of the model, and a llama.cpp chat demo answered in 6.7 seconds versus 18.3 seconds for docker pull plus hf download, with the image indexed once. It runs on Linux and on macOS through a small Lima VM; the figures are the developer's own.