live: heartbeat sync 2026-10-29T17:35:49-07:00 (Refs #11)

agent/managed-skills/radiance-calibration-tap-shape/SKILL.md

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+---
+name: radiance-calibration-tap-shape
+description: "Run and measure a radiance GPTQ calibration tap on a disk-tiered BF16 rig — n-gram tier, step sized to the document, tap marker gates, and reading the real rate from /stats instead of the log."
+---
+
+# Running and measuring a radiance calibration tap
+
+A calibration tap (`RADIANCE_CALIB_DIR` + `RADIANCE_CALIB_TOKENS`) boots a BF16 reference container
+on the serving cards under `--weights-disk-tier` and prefills a corpus until the pooled token floor
+is reached, writing per-expert Grams for GPTQ. It is the one campaign phase whose cost is dominated
+by **disk read volume**, not by compute, and the shape that serves production is the wrong shape for
+it.
+
+## The four things that decide the tap's wall time
+
+1. **N-gram table tier.** On the BF16 payload the table is tens of GiB and `--ngram-placement ram`
+   PINS it. Beside a full host pool that leaves a few GiB of RAM and the boot dies at
+   `startup stopped: out of memory` while the same pool and slot count had already booted the
+   reference recording. Calib only needs the routed weights prefilled, so pass
+   `--ngram-placement disk` for calib and keep `ram` for the KL modes — their numbers are only
+   comparable at an identical shape.
+2. **Step ≥ document length.** A document cut into N steps re-streams each layer's routed expert
+   union N times from the container. With `--max-num-batched-tokens` below the document length the
+   tap runs several times slower than with one wide step, and the KV pool does not change at all
+   (`kv_tokens_total` is unaffected). This is legal for calib and NOT for a scoring boot: scoring
+   numbers are only comparable at one shape, so the step is calib's own knob.
+3. **KV pool, not slots.** When the pool holds barely one document, extra `--max-num-seqs` only
+   queue (and preempt) requests; raising slots does not raise throughput.
+4. **The token floor is pooled, not per round.** One corpus pass may be smaller than the floor, so a
+   round that seals no bytes is NORMAL — a driver that treats a flat round as failure aborts one
+   round early. Fail on a tap that *loses* bytes; let "never sealed" fail at max rounds.
+
+## Never push a tap that belongs to no rig
+
+A tap dir is a directory; production is also an endpoint on the same port. Without proof, a pusher
+will happily feed millions of tokens into whatever answers and record nothing.
+
+- The rig writes a marker into the tap dir at boot (`container=`, `image=`, `pid=`), retires it
+  when its boot exits non-zero, and the pusher refuses unless the marker exists, names the
+  container it targets, and that container is running.
+- The window script stops on a failed phase instead of falling through its health wait, and banks a
+  large reference artifact only when both phases exit 0 and the tap holds files.
+
+## Measuring the rate (do not read it off the log)
+
+The campaign log is `tee`'d and block-buffered, so its request count lags by minutes.
+
+```bash
+curl -s http://127.0.0.1:7770/stats | python3 -c 'import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin); \
+  print({k: d[k] for k in ("uptime_s","prefill_tps","steps_prefill","total_requests","preemptions","kv_tokens_total")})'
+```
+
+`prefill_tps` is CUMULATIVE over uptime — `tokens ≈ prefill_tps × uptime_s`, so take two samples a
+couple of minutes apart and difference them. `steps_prefill / total_requests` proves whether a
+document is one step or many. Discard the first minutes after boot (warmup and the first requests
+are not the steady state).
+
+## Sizing the tap before paying for it
+
+Probe one 5-minute sample at the candidate step, compute the ratio against the inherited shape, and
+choose the floor from the measured rate — not from an earlier campaign's runtime on a different
+corpus and shape. Then set `RADIANCE_CALIB_TOKENS` (via the runner's env knob) and launch ONE run;
+if the probe already beat the bar, that probe run IS the real run and needs no restart.
+
+## Deliverables that make it unattended
+
+- a gated window script: boot → health with a hard timeout → push → stop → restore the service →
+  bank the reference artifact only on success;
+- a pusher that is marker-gated and progress-aware;
+- a ledger line recording the shape used and the target chosen, so the next session does not
+  re-derive it.