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new hive: ds4-worker #50

Description

@adiled

Proposal: a ds4-worker worker hive

Summary

A worker hive whose bees raise ds4 distributed workers as cells. ds4.c already implements distributed (layer-sliced coordinator/worker) and 50/50 tensor-parallel modes, so this hive wraps the already-built data plane into hum's stencil model.

Motivation

This is the most directly valuable new hive: the distributed inference machinery already exists in ds4.c, but it is not yet a hum hive. Making it a worker hive lets hum commission ds4 distributed sessions as first-class cells, coordinated by the Nest pool and ensemble gossip, rather than running them ad hoc.

Hive stencil

  • Typology: worker, optionally worker + forager (ds4-server already exposes OpenAI, Anthropic, and completion surfaces, so a dual-role bee is natural).
  • Bee binary: ds4-worker, launches ds4 as its cell with --role worker --layers A:B (or --role coordinator).
  • Propensity: StatefulSession (ds4 holds KV and session state) or StatelessPerCall.
  • Richness: medium to rich (system, content, tools, pollen).
  • Wire: thrum as a worker; optionally OpenAI /v1/chat/completions as the forager surface so clients can hit the coordinator directly.

Egg spec (candidate)

  • model gguf path, layer slice, kv-disk shard
  • coordinator/worker listen addresses, activation bits (32/16/8)
  • quant and ctx

Cell shape

One ds4 process. feed is the prompt JSON, mmm is the chunk stream, emerged is the process exit, silence cancels. Standard WorkerBee::raise(egg) -> Cell, tended by lifecycle.rs.

Integration with humd / Nest

Workers handshake a humd, announce bee:["worker"], become nestable. The coordinator waits for a complete layer route and streams hidden states through workers; humd should report route coverage. Ensemble gossip can coordinate worker discovery across humds on different machines.

Risks

  • ds4 is DwarfStar-specific (V4 Flash and GLM-5.2 families); this hive is specialized, not generic.
  • Network latency and bandwidth for hidden-state streaming between workers.
  • Requires a ds4 worker binary on each participating machine.

Open questions

  1. How does the Nest / ensemble discover remote ds4 workers across machines?
  2. Should the coordinator be a dual-role (worker + forager) bee, or two separate hives?
  3. What is the right default activation-bit width given the bandwidth tradeoff (32/16/8)?

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