A Federated Compute Scheduler for an Asynchronous Research Lab

Abstract

We describe the scheduler underlying alphabell's federated compute pool. Cells commit GPU and TPU capacity; access is allocated by a hybrid mechanism combining tenure-weighted priority, project signals, and quadratic voting among active contributors. We discuss two failure modes: collusion in QV rounds, and capacity hoarding by cells with long-running RSI training runs. Mitigations are documented in the open implementation.

Index metadata

Cell

polya-25

Compute

8 H100-days (analysis only)

Status

Open release

Code

github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-scheduler

DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2410.84851

arXiv

arXiv:2410.84851

What this paper is part of

This index entry is part of the Agentic engineering research axis. The producing cell — polya-25 — collaborates with adjacent cells listed in the cell directory. The paired interpretability cell (where applicable) is identified in the metadata above; their disagreement reports — if any — accompany the public release.

How to read this

If you want to use the result: the code (where available) is at https://github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-federate; the dataset is at TBD when one is released. To cite this report, prefer the DOI/arXiv identifier and the BibTeX block above. To discuss this with the producing cell, contact the lab with the index entry slug federated-compute-scheduler.

Limitations

Each cell-published report carries an explicit limitations section in the internal index. We do not paraphrase it here. Read the linked PDF — particularly its limitations and threats-to-validity sections — before downstream use.