Malcolm: Multi-agent Learning for Cooperative Load Management at Rack Scale
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider the problem of balancing the load among servers in dense racks for microsecond-scale workloads. To balance the load in such settings tens of millions of scheduling decisions have to be made per second. Achieving this throughput while providing microsecond-scale latency and high availability is extremely challenging. To address this challenge, we design a fully decentralized load-balancing framework. In this framework, servers collectively balance the load in the system. We model the interactions among servers as a cooperative stochastic game. To find the game's parametric Nash equilibrium, we design and implement a decentralized algorithm based on multi-agent-learning theory. We empirically show that our proposed algorithm is adaptive and scalable while outperforming state-of-the art alternatives. In homogeneous settings, Malcolm performs as well as the best alternative among other baselines. In heterogeneous settings, compared to other baselines, for lower loads, Malcolm improves tail latency by up to a factor of four. And for the same tail latency, Malcolm achieves up to 60% more throughput compared to the best alternative among other baselines.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it