v
@vsoch
Principal Computer Scientist 🫒
🫒Olive oil update! I’ve finished 69 bottles in about 5 months, and my current favorites are La Tourangelle Smooth and Fruity (on my second tin), Finca La Barca (finishing my second bottle) and Castillo de Canena Sherry Cask (fourth bottle). 😋
I wrote some additional good feelings and thoughts 😊 about the trip here. vsoch.github.io/2026/hpc-cen... Thank you to @pearcconference.bsky.social for the beautiful venue and opportunity to share my excitement for our #HPC and agentic future.
I present the two-queue problem for co-scheduling of two different queues, and design solutions using the #FluxFramework scheduler Fluxion in Kubernetes and (WIP) on-premises. Our graph-based approach models quantum as a first class resource, and is extendable to other custom types
I get obsessively interested in topics, to the point my curiosity is insatiable. It is happening with quantum computing, and here is some learning.😊 vsoch.github.io/2026/quantum... I think along with scheduling work I want to model scheduling algorithms with qiskit (and similar).
Want to learn about #FluxFramework with live presentations and tutorials? Come to our HPCIC Developer Tutorial, July 21st! I may have something up my sleeve this year that is a bit cutting edge... hope to see you there! llnlfed.webex.com/weblink/regi... Registration is free and open to anyone!
Interested to learn about our work in agentic science, with some added #FluxFramework? Please attend the #HPCKP meeting in Barcelona! 💃 I am excited for this work, and for the future of science. After recording this talk, I was moved to dance!🌹 hpckp.org/annual-meeti...
I am building large containers locally that have layers too large for push from my home wireless. "Ah, I'll use an instance on Google Cloud!" I thought. I tried to get *one* c4-standard-96 instance, and then c3-standard-88. Could I? Nope. I tried every zone. 😭 It is Saturday. 🙃
🫒 Olive Oil, orchard, and market review - La Olivina, and Olive Oil Pantry! olive-oil-girl.blogspot.com/2026/05/oliv...
An agent just wrote and ran an entire #snakemake workflow using our agentic tools + mcpserver! 🐍 Running snakemake would be too easy. I've given the agent just inputs + a wrappers catalog and said "figure it out." The agent gets controlled access to a workdir, and incrementally figures out steps.
My design approach is simplicity. You install the operator with two commands (eventually will be one) and create your cluster. The spec I might change as I learn more about Slurm. Here is the cluster for EFA. This could be reduced to a node.nodespec and size for a simple deployment.
I got to the point where I needed something that would deploy easily and quickly. I updated our operator (created 3 years ago, before SUNK and Slinky) for ARM support and it's working great! 😘 I am going to be removing the dependency on JobSet.
Running jobs with our #Slurm Operator today! 😘 I'm enjoying learning about build, admin, and config of Slurm. I'm running on AWS hpc7g with EFA, and (so far) the jobs are comparable in performance to Flux! Would ❤️ to write a paper, "Workload managers, they are all pretty good. Stop the quibbles" 😆
This looks to be the cloud compute variant of the famous vending machine, "The light is out but I still work." 😅 We feel you, little Gemini 2.0 Flash API. 🫂
I need to be conservative about buying this particular packaging again (and others like it) due to microplastics. There is plenty of research to show it's a bad idea. Won't stop me from finishing this one! The good news is that it is also sold in glass and can!🥫 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
It is lightly golden, advertised as punchy with a kick. I disagree. It has a subtle, fruity bitterness that gives anticipation of more, but lingers on the tongue. There are several negative reviews, but I like it. I'm on my second bottle. 😋 I will likely try the Sizzle variant next. 👩🍳
Olive Oil Review! 🫒 This is Graza, single origin Picual from Jaen Spain, the non-cooking "Drizzle" variant. I got the squeeze bottle for travel. Little did I know it was available in the supermarket across from the venue! I consumed most of my first bottle in that week. 😁 How was it? 🤔
Some thinking on how observation (meta-cognition) can lead to a mindset of acceptance, and better appreciation and pursuit of life experience. vsoch.github.io/2026/observa...
The @hpsf.bsky.social pictures are up! www.flickr.com/photos/20274... There are so many great shots of smiles! This is my favorite - myself and Evan from #AWS on our panel on distributed workflows. 🌀
The screen was also blurry, so I was recalling slides in my head. This was a talk in "expert" mode. 😆 At the time, I was not happy with it. I knew I could do better, and I will! 💪 Thank you to everyone at @hpsf.bsky.social. A conference focused on community, projects is so much better than papers.
This was also the hardest talk I've ever given. By 3 minutes I could not breathe. You can subtly hear gasps and my voice cracks. I don't normally do that! 😆 I cut out detail toward the end (hence the shorter time). Perhaps it was my pace, or CO2? After the fact, I loved we had +time for questions. 🤓
I close with what our team is actively working on, followed by questions. I loved answering the questions! ❤️ The work makes me excited for the future, grateful for the people that I work with, and for #LivermoreComputing for providing a base for intellectual and temporal freedom. Thank you. 🥰
I ask a hard question, which (not surprisingly) delves from the technology space into cultural. Are we ready for this change? There is a skill gap to be bridged, but also a lot of AI skepticism. Some folks sit in slack channels griping all day. It's not the tech. It's how we choose to use it. 💪
A taste of WIP. This is more agentic workload scheduling. The server is designed with a hub and worker architecture. The worker discovers resource providers, registers to the hub, and a secretary agent receives requests for work and respond with proposals. The hub uses algorithms to choose one. 🧠
Agentic frameworks are design philosophies. You have a goal. You have a server with resources. You then have a model that can act as a brain to respond to prompts, and make tool calls. It's up to your framework to decide how to coordinate those things. That's it! We have our own design philosophy. 🌀
I briefly talk about our generic mcp-server, which supports the tools, prompts, resources, and events to be added dynamically. What are those tools? We have developed flux-mcp for Flux Framework, and hpc-mcp is where I put tools for @spackpm.bsky.social, docker, kubectl, git, filesystem, etc.
The updated orchestration can also deliver events for the agent to react to, and is more robust. I'll save that for a future share. 😉 I talk about server deployment use cases: for an application (under a job), for a cluster (as a persistent service) and for a center (same, with hardened authZ).
I transition into our next stage of work (I'm finishing up now) where we've updated the framework to use the model context protocol, and we design the framework to be more modular to accept on the fly sub-agents, tool definitions. It's kind of just an API standard we agreed upon? Can I say that? 😅