Minions

Headlines · 1

1. Oct 12
   Apple's Minions turns idle Macs into an internal virtual GPU cloud

   Apple researchers published a paper describing Minions, an internal "virtual GPU cloud" that aggregates idle Apple Silicon Macs across the network to run machine learning inference. A Minion Server splits submitted jobs into subtasks stored in PostgreSQL, a Minion Executor on each Mac pulls subtasks over REST APIs and runs them on the local GPU with inputs and outputs in Amazon S3, and a Minion Watchdog requeues unfinished work when a machine sleeps, goes offline, powers off or its user stops the executor, using five-minute heartbeats. The paper says Minions only handles inference — embeddings with Hugging Face transformer models and text generation through Ollama installed on each Mac — and Apple reports that some jobs that once faced 10-plus-hour centralized GPU queues could start within minutes, figures that come from Apple's own testing and leave cross-team data confidentiality as an open concern.

   Apple Machine Learning Research · 🔥 0

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