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compute/docs/positioning.md
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Lumbridge Compute
Governed compute for unified-memory AI hardware — machines where CPU and GPU
share one pool and there is no separate VRAM allocation to bounce off.
Over-commit that pool and the box thrashes and wedges, SSH and ping included,
before the OOM killer gets a turn.

Compute does not run inference. It supervises the servers that do: admission
control against both a declared budget and what the machine actually has free,
a 1 Hz watchdog that stops the newest model before thrash, Scenes activated as
one transactional unit with rollback, process ownership bound to
(boot_id, pid, start_time_ticks, pgid) so a reused PID can never be
group-killed, a protocol-transparent gateway, an MCP server, and a read-only
HTTP API for dashboards.

Registry footprints in this release are measured on a live node rather than
estimated.

One binary, six direct dependencies. Apache-2.0.

Generated by scripts/publish-compute.sh, which refuses to publish a tree it
cannot prove clean.
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Positioning

Where Lumbridge Compute sits relative to the tools people already know. The short version: the neighbors solve different problems, and the closest one has exactly the gap Lumbridge Compute fills.

The landscape

Tool Axis What it does Gap for a unified-memory box
exo scale out Shards one big model across many boxes (Thunderbolt/RDMA, MLX, Apple-first) Doesn't run many models on one box; not GB10/GB300-native
Ollama single model Dead-simple pull/run one LLM, huge library No multi-service orchestration, no memory governor
llama-swap swap in/out On-demand load/unload, TTL idle-unload, co-run matrix, any OpenAI server "No memory budgeting or OOM prevention" (their words), LLM-swapping not capability-stacks, no scheduling/sharing
LiteLLM routing One OpenAI endpoint in front of many backends A proxy — doesn't manage lifecycle or memory

The one-liner

exo runs one model across many boxes. Lumbridge Compute runs many models on one box — safely.

Orthogonal, not competing — you can run Lumbridge Compute on each node of an exo cluster.

Where Lumbridge Compute is unique

  1. The Governor. No one else does unified-memory admission control + an OOM-wedge watchdog. It's the pain specific to Grace-Blackwell shared memory, where over-commit wedges the whole box instead of failing a single allocation. This is the moat.
  2. Scenes are capability stacks, not model swaps. llama-swap picks which LLM answers. Scenes compose heterogeneous services together — ASR + LLM + TTS + image + music — as one activatable unit.
  3. Scheduled scenes — time-multiplex a box by hour (live assistant by day, image farm overnight). Nobody does this.
  4. Shareable scene registry — publish and pull scenes. The community flywheel.
  5. GB10 / GB300 / RTX-native — NVFP4, flashinfer MoE backend, sm_121a. exo is Apple-first; Lumbridge Compute is Grace-Blackwell-first.

Ideas worth borrowing (don't reinvent)

  • From llama-swap: TTL idle-unload; an OpenAI-compatible gateway in front so apps hit one stable endpoint regardless of which scene is live; a web UI; Prometheus metrics; install via brew/binary/docker.
  • From Ollama: one-command onboarding and a friendly model pull/ls/rm UX + a library.
  • From LiteLLM: the router-in-front pattern — pairs with scenes (the served_name aliases already point this way).
  • From exo: OpenAI + Anthropic + Ollama-compatible APIs; later, auto-discovery so Lumbridge Compute can coordinate scenes across two Sparks.

The model manager angle

Lumbridge Compute's model commands aren't just another Ollama. They're governor-aware and scene-aware: Lumbridge Compute knows each model's footprint, warns before you pull something no scene could ever hold, and shows which scenes a model belongs to. Ollama manages files; Lumbridge Compute manages what can actually run together.