Commit Graph
14 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5.5 bf2d171e89 Read NVLink and GPU-to-adapter distance from nvidia-smi topo
The release binary is built without cgo, so without NVML, and NVML was
the only source of NVLink peers: on every NVLink machine the portable
agent reported none, and tensor-parallel groups were chosen by GPU index.
Discovery now reads `nvidia-smi topo -m` after either path, for the
NVLink peers (kept from NVML where it gave them), each card's NUMA node,
and how far each network adapter is from it - PIX, PXB, PHB, NODE or
SYS - which travels to the control plane as nic_paths for placement to
use. Both the NICn-with-legend layout of newer drivers and the
adapter-named columns of older ones are read.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 00:09:26 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5.5 daed835d88 Measure each node's CPU and memory, and give every node a page
The nodes are CPU machines, and nothing measured how busy one was: the
heartbeat carried GPU memory and disk, and llmgw_node_memory_bytes is the
total. The agent now reads /proc between heartbeats - CPU across all
cores, load averages, memory used and available, and each engine's
process group's cores and resident memory - and sends it with the
heartbeat. Nothing new runs on the nodes and Prometheus needs no new
target: the control plane exports it with the rest of the fleet, as
llmgw_node_cpu_utilization_percent, llmgw_node_cpus, llmgw_node_load,
llmgw_node_memory_used_bytes, llmgw_node_memory_available_bytes,
llmgw_shard_cpu_cores and llmgw_shard_memory_bytes. A measurement more
than a minute old is left out rather than repeated.

The cluster page's node table shows CPU and RAM as bars, and each node
links to a page of its own: current CPU, RAM, load and disk, the engines
on it with their cores and memory, and an hour of CPU, RAM, load,
per-model cores and memory and queue depth from Prometheus. It refreshes
in place.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-28 23:21:23 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5.5 f5d6210b86 Install engines on any glibc system, with its own package manager
The llama.cpp build is published from Ubuntu but is not Ubuntu's in any way
that matters: it needs glibc 2.34 and GCC 12's libstdc++, which Debian 12
and RHEL 10 have and RHEL 9 does not. Refusing every system not called
"ubuntu" turned away the first two for their name. The build is now tried
everywhere, and ldd decides.

What ldd says is made readable. "/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version
`GLIBCXX_3.4.30' not found" is a system too old for the build, and is
reported as "libstdc++.so.6 is too old (needs GLIBCXX_3.4.30)", once —
rather than as a missing library that is plainly installed.

Packages are named per family — libgomp1 for Debian's, libgomp for Red
Hat's — and installed with whichever of apt-get, dnf, yum or zypper the
machine has, decided from ID_LIKE rather than a list of distribution names.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-28 11:10:06 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5.5 7d97c6b74f Install a node's engines on the node, instead of trusting what is there
A node ran whatever llama-server somebody had once unpacked on it. Onboarding
checked an engine only when told its path, installed none, and a node with
nothing on it registered as ready. The one time that went wrong it went wrong
invisibly: the binary was there, executable, and could not start for want of
libgomp1, while the node reported healthy.

The control plane now says which engines every node has, at which version —
`engines:` in server.yaml, defaulting to the llama.cpp build this release was
checked against — and each agent converges on it. What only the node can
know, the node works out: the build for its processor and driver (CUDA with
its runtime when an NVIDIA driver is loaded, CPU otherwise), the OS packages
that build needs from its own package sources, and whether the result runs.
Every archive is checked against the sha256 GitHub publishes for it and
unpacked refusing any path or link that leaves the install directory. ldd
names a missing library outright; running `--version` proves the rest. Only
then is a directory marked installed, and it is checked again every ten
minutes, because an unrelated upgrade can remove a library.

An engine is reported only once installed and seen to run, or when the
agent's configuration names it on purpose — never because something happened
to be on PATH. The agent now says when it has probed, so an empty list means
"has none" rather than "too old to say": a node rebuilt from nothing is no
longer a candidate for every model at the moment it can run none of them.
Placement's refusal carries the node's own words, "installing: downloading
llama-b10991-bin-ubuntu-x64.tar.gz (16 MB)", and so do `ctl nodes` and the
cluster page, along with a warning for a CPU without AVX2 — the VM CPU type
that makes everything five times slower and nothing look wrong.

Agents also report their OS, architecture, vector extensions and NVIDIA
driver. Onboarding installs llmgw itself from the CI release for the node's
architecture, checked against the release's checksums, rather than copying
whatever binary the operator's machine had.

vLLM and SGLang are not installed yet: they are Python environments of
several gigabytes, not an archive, and still have to be named in the agent's
configuration.

Also fixes a race on the weights fingerprint, which two heartbeat loops touch
during a failover.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-28 10:59:59 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5.5 20deb22dfa Let a node describe itself instead of being described by hand
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m47s
Every agent file on the cluster named its own node, its own address, the
path to llama-server and two weight directories — different on every node,
kept true by hand, and not true: node05 carried "ram: 32g" beside a measured
31 GB, looked for weights in an empty directory while fetching them into
another, and the other four never looked in theirs at all, so four nodes
reported no disk. Growing a node's RAM would have gone unnoticed, because
memory was read once, at registration.

The agent now finds these out. Its id is the hostname, which is also the
certificate's common name. Its address is the one on the route to the
control plane, which the kernel picks for a UDP dial without sending
anything. llama-server is looked for on PATH and then where release archives
are unpacked. A missing nvidia-smi is a node without NVIDIA cards rather
than a failed discovery — which also cut discovery short before InfiniBand
on every CPU node not told to skip GPUs. Fetched weights land in
/var/lib/llmgw-weights by default, and wherever they land is always looked
in.

Memory is read on every heartbeat, and installed engines are probed again
each minute and sent when they change, so a VM given more RAM or a node
given vLLM becomes a candidate without anyone restarting its agent. The
control plane logs both changes, since "the node now qualifies" is the
answer to why a model placed an hour after it was asked for.

What is written still wins. The agent file shrinks to the control plane's
addresses and the TLS files, the same on every node; onboarding writes only
the overrides it was given. What cannot be found stays configuration: which
fabric an adapter is on, because OpenSM's default prefix is the same on all
of them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-28 10:13:42 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 753f4e3265 Let a node say how much room it has left
CI / test (push) Failing after 1m31s
Disk was the one resource nothing reported. `statfs` was already being called
on every model directory, but only to ask whether the filesystem was a network
one — the free space it returns in the same struct was thrown away. So the
only way to find out why a node was filling up was to ssh to it, which is what
this system exists to avoid.

Reported per filesystem rather than per configured directory. Free space
belongs to the disk, not the path: two model directories on one disk are one
pool of bytes, and counting them separately would let the control plane add
24 GB to 24 GB and place a 40 GB model on a node that has 24.

Shared filesystems are summed separately from local ones and left out of a
node's own total. Space on a filer belongs to everyone mounting it, so twenty
nodes would otherwise each report the same free terabyte, and a scheduler
would place twenty models into room for one.

Nothing reported means nothing is known, everywhere: an agent too old to send
storage and a node with no model directories both send nothing, and both must
read as unknown rather than as a full disk. `ctl nodes` and the dashboard show
a dash, the metric is absent rather than zero, and a missing directory — which
is what an unmounted filer looks like — is skipped rather than reported as
having no space.

Shown as free out of total, because the first is useless without the second:
8 GB free is comfortable on a 10 TB filer and nearly full on a 10 GB root
partition, and only the second stops a model being placed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-18 09:38:57 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 b619546516 Stop trusting hardware facts that were never checked
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m32s
Three places where the system took the infrastructure's word for something
and would have failed silently on real hardware.

A declared fabric adapter that is not on the node. Fabric membership has to
be configuration — OpenSM's default subnet prefix is identical on every
fabric, so a matching prefix proves nothing — but taking it entirely on
trust was a different mistake. A typo, or a card that enumerated
differently after a reboot, produced NCCL_IB_HCA naming an adapter that
does not exist.

An adapter with no ACTIVE port. Physically linked with no subnet manager
sits in INIT: it looks healthy to anything counting adapters, carries no
data, survives a reboot, and looks like a software problem. Discovery had
recorded port state all along and placement only ever asked whether a
fabric had any adapters listed.

Both end the same way — the replica starts, passes its health checks, and
hangs on its first all-reduce, which is the failure the fabric invariant
exists to prevent arriving through a door nobody was watching. The agent
now compares declared against discovered, where both are visible for the
only time, and does not advertise a fabric that cannot carry traffic. The
reason is logged on the machine that knows it, because the operator who
typed the adapter name is the only person who can fix it. The fabric's rate
is the slowest active link, since a collective runs at the speed of its
slowest.

And NVLink topology, which no published binary could see. NVML is its only
source, the bindings need cgo, and CGO_ENABLED=0 is deliberate so the
portable binary runs on an older libc. The cost was silent: tensor groups
fall back to the lowest free indices, which is right on an SXM board with
NVSwitch and wrong on a PCIe box where bridges pair specific cards — a
group straddling two of them runs several times slower and nothing says so.
Releases now also publish an nvml build for those nodes, and
llmgw_gpu_nvlink_peers makes the difference visible: a flat zero across a
fleet means the topology is unknown rather than absent.

A test that declared mlx5_0 and mlx5_1 on a node whose sysfs held neither
had been passing, because nothing compared the two.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-17 17:29:15 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 42fd0aa31e Export what the cluster is made of, not only what it is serving
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m28s
The router published twenty-two metric families about requests, endpoints,
admission and scoring — everything about traffic and nothing about the
machines carrying it. There was no way to graph GPU usage, watch a node go
unhealthy, see a fabric fill up, or answer "was the cluster full at the
time", which is the first question anyone asks after an incident. The
agents exported nothing at all.

Exported by the control plane rather than by each agent. It already holds
every number: hardware arrives at registration and state on each heartbeat,
so this is a map read away. One scrape target for a fleet of hundreds, no
Prometheus configuration per node, no firewall rule per machine, and
nothing new running on the nodes. On the same /metrics as the traffic
figures, because correlating "the cluster was full" with "requests were
queueing" should not need two systems.

A collector rather than gauges kept current by a ticker: the numbers are
derived from state that already exists, so computing them when asked is
simpler than maintaining a copy that can drift, and nothing runs between
scrapes.

GPU utilisation is new, and is the number people actually watch. Memory
used says a model is loaded; this says whether it is doing anything, and a
fleet at ninety percent occupancy and two percent utilisation is a fleet
holding models nobody is asking for.

Adding it caught two things. utilization.gpu goes last in the nvidia-smi
query and is optional, because a driver too old to know it returns a
shorter row — requiring it made an llmgw upgrade silently stop discovering
GPUs on an older node, which is far worse than not knowing how busy a card
is. And I gave the new protobuf field number 14, which ecc_errors already
had; buf lint is why that was a moment rather than a corrupted wire format.

Absent is kept distinct from zero throughout, for the same reason as
everywhere else here: an unreported utilisation shown as a flat zero reads
as an idle fleet rather than a missing measurement, and a replica nothing
has reported would be the most idle thing in the cluster.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-17 15:09:27 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 c13c567cc5 Know where the weights are, without owning the storage
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m32s
Storage will be different at every installation — Lustre, NFS over RDMA, an
image exported with SRP or NVMe-oF, local NVMe, an rsync — so llmgw observes
it rather than managing it. An agent told which directories to look in
reports what it can see; how the files got there is nobody's business here,
and a node told nothing reports nothing and behaves exactly as every node
did before this existed.

That fact buys two things. Placement prefers a node that already holds the
model over one that must first move tens of gigabytes, as a preference and
never a filter: fetching them is a valid answer, and refusing to place would
turn a slow start into no start at all. And ctl status shows what each
fabric holds.

Per fabric because fabrics are not connected to one another. Weights in
ib-a are not weights in ib-b — the only path between them is the management
network — so a model seeded into one fabric leaves the rest of the cluster
unable to serve it without a slow copy, and nothing said so before now. One
shared filer counts the same as twenty local copies, because "can this
fabric serve it" is the question being asked.

Three distinctions the tests hold to, because each is a way to get this
quietly wrong. A node that was never asked to look must rank with one that
looked and has nothing, or enabling the feature on a single node would
drain every other. An empty directory is not weights, because a
half-finished download looks exactly like one and would send placement to a
node whose engine then fails to load. And local storage is never mistaken
for shared: a filer read as local costs an unnecessary copy, while local
read as shared would have the cluster believe a model is everywhere when it
is on one node.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-17 08:21:16 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 d71d785598 Report node memory even when GPU discovery fails
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m31s
Deploying the memory-aware placement showed node01 to node04 reporting 7G
and node05 reporting nothing, on a machine whose /proc/meminfo plainly says
32 GB. node05 has no nvidia-smi, so GPU discovery returns an error, Discover
returns with it, and the memory read — which has nothing to do with cards —
never happened.

That is the node whose memory matters most, because a CPU profile is what a
GPU-less node will be asked to run, and min_memory_gb would have excluded it
from everything.

Read first now, before any path that can return early. The test fails
against the old order.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 23:50:53 +02:00
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 3081c6f69b Place on nodes that can actually hold the model
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m23s
Placement had no idea how much memory a node has or a model needs. A CPU
profile has no card to be free, so eligibleNodes accepted every ready node:
Qwen2.5-Coder 14B, whose working set is about 24 GB, would have been placed
just as happily on one of the 8 GB nodes, which reports itself perfectly
healthy right up until the OOM killer arrives.

node_selector was yesterday's stopgap and it is the operator restating by
hand something the system can know. Agents now report MemTotal, profiles
declare min_memory_gb, and placement filters on it, naming what was short —
"has 8 GB of memory, needs 24" is actionable where "no candidates were
considered" is not. The label selector stays, because "this node is for
coding models" is a real thing to want to say that memory does not express.

Two deliberate non-exclusions. A profile with no requirement fits anywhere,
which is every profile that exists today. And a node that reports no memory
is still usable: an agent older than the field says nothing, and letting a
control plane upgrade quietly empty half a fleet is a worse failure than the
one this prevents.

ctl nodes grows a MEM column showing "-" rather than 0 for a node that did
not say, because an old agent is not a small machine.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 23:12:44 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 2373726efd Agent stream: connect the fleet to the control plane
CI / test (push) Failing after 1m29s
One bidirectional connect-go stream per node, carrying registration, heartbeats
and shard status up, and start, stop and drain down. The agent dials out: GPU
nodes sit behind firewalls far more often than a control plane does, and an
outbound connection needs no inbound rule on every node in the fleet.

- registration carries the whole hardware inventory, so there is no separate
  discovery call and a reconnecting agent refreshes what the scheduler knows.
  The fabric labels travel with it; they cannot be inferred from the wire, so
  losing them in transit would silently disable multi-node placement.
- agentsvc is both the stream handler and the reconciler's dispatcher, because
  it holds the open streams and is therefore the only thing that can deliver a
  command to a node.
- the agent validates a profile before launching anything, since an engine that
  refuses a profile does so after minutes of loading, then supervises the
  process and reports every transition with the engine's output tail on failure.
- reconnects forever with jittered backoff. A control plane restart must not
  require touching every GPU node, and a fleet must not reconnect in lockstep
  and knock it over again. Engines keep serving throughout, because the router
  talks to them directly.

llmgw agent is real now, and llmgw server runs a control plane whenever any
model declares a profile. The static endpoint list stays for router-only runs.

Verified with real binaries as separate processes: the agent registers, a
replica is placed, an engine launches through the vLLM adapter's actual argument
construction, streaming traffic is served, and killing the agent moves the node
through unreachable to lost with placement explaining why nothing can run.

config.Model and catalog.Model were the same thing described twice, so the
router now reads catalog entries directly and the validation rules live in one
place.

Still missing: mTLS. The stream is plaintext HTTP/2 and must stay on a trusted
network until that lands.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 02:48:21 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 55417546fc Phase 2 (2/2): NVML backend behind a build tag
CI / test (push) Successful in 1m37s
NVML is the only source of NVLink topology, and that topology is what keeps a
tensor-parallel group off the slow path inside a node. It needs cgo, so it sits
behind the nvml tag and the default build keeps using nvidia-smi.

Discover() picks the backend and falls back to nvidia-smi when NVML fails,
logging the fallback rather than performing it silently: on a node that is meant
to have working NVML, a quiet downgrade hides a broken driver installation and
costs the scheduler its topology.

CI now compiles the tagged build. That immediately paid for itself: ErrNoNVML
was declared only in the untagged file, so the tests did not compile under
-tags nvml. It is now declared where both builds can see it.

Not verified: the NVML path has never run against a driver, because there is no
GPU machine available. The NVLink domains it reports should be treated as
unverified until someone runs `llmgw agent inventory` on a real node.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 02:05:25 +02:00
ilkerandClaude Opus 5 6a13e3dddf Phase 2 (1/2): node discovery, engine adapters, process supervisor
CI / test (push) Successful in 45s
Everything here works without GPUs and is covered by tests. The control plane
connection is not built yet, so llmgw agent itself is still a stub and the phase
exit criterion is not met.

- discovery: IB from /sys/class/infiniband, parsing the formats sysfs actually
  uses and telling native InfiniBand from RoCE; GPUs via nvidia-smi, the
  cgo-free path, with health flags for uncorrected ECC and memory already held
  by another process. A node without IB is not an error, it is a single-node
  island.
- engines: vLLM and SGLang command and environment construction, kept free of
  process handling so it stays testable. The NCCL environment is the part the
  plan marks critical: NCCL_IB_HCA lists only the chosen fabric's adapters,
  because leaving it open lets NCCL pick an adapter on a fabric where the peer
  is unreachable, and the job then hangs instead of failing.
- validation before launch: no mixed GPU types in a tensor-parallel group, the
  node/GPU/TP arithmetic has to add up, and fp8 is refused below compute
  capability 8.9 rather than silently falling back to a slower path.
- supervisor: process groups, because engines fork workers that hold GPU memory
  and outlive a signal sent only to the leader; a bounded log tail, since engine
  output is the only diagnosis when loading fails; Starting separate from
  Loading, because a 70B model legitimately takes minutes; and orphan adoption
  through pid files fingerprinted with the command line, since pids get reused
  and adopting an unrelated process is worse than leaking the original.
- readiness is two questions: /health says the process is up, /v1/models says
  the weights loaded. Routing on /health alone sends traffic into a loading model.
- llmgw agent inventory reports what the scheduler would see on a node.

One plan correction: GPU class sizes come from the driver in GiB, which does not
always match the marketing name. An L40S is sold as 48GB and reports 44.99 GiB,
so its class is l40s-45g, not l40s-48g. Consistency matters more than matching
the box, because that number decides whether a model fits. Plan §2 and §5.1
updated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 02:01:59 +02:00