launcher/history/night-shifts/2026-09-27.md

Night shift 2026-09-27 (UTC)

Plan (user, carried from 09-26): close the DeepSeek perf gap by making weight/ engram I/O node-local NVMe (the way the published references do), EXL3 first, then Aiden SGLang engram staging.

EXL3 3bpw 2x — weight localization (dgx1+dgx2)

Baseline: 13.3 t/s decode — weights streamed from NAS on every forward. Reference (coolbho3k, same kit rev 878e0ee): weights+engrams on each host's local NVMe, ~30.8 t/s.

Staging of models--coolbho3k--DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-EXL3-3bpw (+ DSpark drafter) to /home/kilork/hf-local/hub, page15 pack intentionally not staged (optional +1.4% decode per the release notes; 195 G/node).

The staging itself turned into a six-generation saga — every generation of my mirror script taught a different lesson about the hub layout:

1. hub-level vs repo-level blob stores — snapshot entries link ../../blobs/<sha>; on the NAS that link may itself be a symlink into the 2-char hub store (hub/blobs/4d/<sha>). A mirror that materializes only the link string's own path leaves 51 weight shards resolving through NAS (and later hardlink/fetch passes re-fetching 130 G+ of data that was already local).
2. page15's content lives as real files inside snapshots/<rev>/ on the NAS — shutil.copytree copies them silently (195 G/node wasted, ENOSPC on both nodes); copytree(dirs_exist_ok=True) is additionally not idempotent on symlinks (EEXIST aborts the pass).
3. NAS st_mtime staleness over NFS made a size-only "already copied" check report a complete mirror while link targets were absent — size+ sampled-content hashing (head+tail reads) is the only check that survives NFS.
4. Size-based hardlink dedup between stores can bind the wrong file when two weights share a size; must verify content first (caught: 4 weight blobs had been relinked to the wrong shard — engine then failed with Duplicate mapped checkpoint key: …experts.300.w1.trellis).
5. Final clean pass: wipe local repos, mirror trees + materialize every link target, realpath-map through the hub store, then per-blob sample-hash verify against NAS. Both nodes: 141/141 links local, 0 mismatches (/tmp/stage-exl3-v9.py, links ok: 141, dangling: 0).

The three crash layers after staging

• EngineCore init failure #1: 51 weight blobs silently wrong (see 4). Fixed by the verify pass.
• FileExistsError: /cache/ds41-backend-attestation — the kit's receipt writer is strict-on-exists (ROOT.mkdir(exist_ok=False) + open('xb')): receipts are per-run and the stale root/worker.json from yesterday's bench run was root-owned, so a plain rm -rf as the launcher user failed and poisoned every restart. The recipe's before_serve now clears all three receipt roots (ds41-backend-attestation, ds41-combined-ready, ds41-display-kv) with sudo rm -rf — correct fresh-run semantics.
• Same error persisted: the page15 binds were gone with my no-page15 tree (the pack is optional, but the kit's loader still references it when mounted — the 171-mount manifest of the healthy baseline included 30 NAS fallback binds). The hook now falls back to the NAS tree for any snapshot directory not staged locally, so the manifest is back to 171 mounts (141 local + 30 NAS page15, read-only).

Result (measured, 27 Sep ~04:20 UTC)

• API up 9 min after serve (streaming weights from local NVMe, full attestation passes on both ranks).
• Smoke: 127*89 → 11303, 1.5 s.
• Decode probe (487-token prompt, 400 tok, temp 0): 35.0 t/s (34–41 under DSpark), previous 13.3 t/s — 2.6×, above the 30.78 t/s reference. Prefill unchanged in profile; a bench is queued to verify the 164/176 quality baseline stands with local weights.

Recipe changes committed: page15 NAS-fallback binds + receipt-clean hook.

Mia AI-Lab TP4 — forum thread discovery (end of shift)

The thread /t/382725 continuation (posts #136–#156) points at MiaAI-Lab/DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-DGX-Sparks — an SGLang TP4 "production line" (knapcio's fork + RoCEnante + b12x + prefill SP + gated decode adapters). Claims that matter: prose decode c1 87.7 tok/s (ours, aiden16 lane: ~20), prefill 4.0–5.9K tok/s cold, 8M-token KV pin with a 1,011,084-token needle verified, qeval 72/75; stu.miller's independent A/B (post #142, Sept 15 → Sept 25 builds, same 4 Sparks): prefill 300K 223.4s → 83.8s, decode c1 43.5 → 67.3, tool-eval 89/100, median turn 2.74 s. Repo is real, dense (29 adapters, row_store.cpp, packed engram shards, sources.manifest), pinned lmsysorg/sglang:dev-dsv41@3dbc3130… + checkpoint fb2764a5. Claims unverified until benched here. Their pack_engram.py (≈48 GiB/rank) is exactly our staging sparse-rows spec — the localization story and this lane converge.

Open

• Bench re-run passed on the localized lane: 169/184 (92/100, ★★★★★) — same standing as the 164/176 (93/100) baseline across the slightly different scenario pools (harness moved v2.7.0 → v2.7.1.dev7 by the operator; TC-74 injection failure is identical to the previous run — not a localization regression). Perf table: pp 690–795 t/s (was 112), tg 17–33 t/s (was ~13.3). Report recipes/dsv41-flash-exl3-2x/reports/2026-09-27_053009_exl3-2x-local.*.
• Aiden SGLang 4x engram localization — ranges derived (tables 384,006,168 / 384,016,682 rows, contiguous quarter-partitions per rank, ~47.2 GiB/rank per Aiden docs); needs dgx3/4 powered and dgx1/2 freed.
• Registry go-live + r39 prod cut — operator decisions.