July 2026: a governor for one GPU box

The earliest commit in our history is dated 14 July 2026. It is a small Rust program for GPU boxes with unified memory. It is the oldest ancestor of what is now Lumbridge Computer.

A box that wedges instead of failing

On such a box the models and the operating system share one pool of memory. When that pool runs out, the machine does not return an error. It wedges. The first commit describes the program as a model orchestrator whose job is to prevent that.

It had two ideas, and both are still in the product. A governor checks memory before a model starts and watches it afterwards. A scene is a named bundle of models that run together, so one box can do different jobs at different times.

The first commit could only read the box. A second commit the same day let it act. It could activate a scene, stop the models that did not belong, start the rest smallest first, and wait for each one to report healthy. A watchdog checked free memory once a second. Below a floor, it stopped the newest model first.

A decision: test it without a GPU

That second commit also added a demo registry. Tiny web servers stood in for models. With it, activation, swapping and the watchdog could be tested on any Linux machine. We kept the habit. On 1 August we added a simulator in the same spirit. It models the governor’s arithmetic with no accelerator present.

$ lumbridge-computer status
$ lumbridge-computer scene ls
$ lumbridge-computer scene activate <name> --dry-run

The rest of the month

On 23 July we added an evaluation runner. Its suites write their results as JSON files. The same commit added a CI workflow and systemd units for the watchdog and the default scene.

On 30 July the program got a resident supervisor for scenes. The cutover plan kept the running scene alive and stopped only the old standalone watchdog. That day is also the first time the name Lumbridge appears in any commit we can find.

We have no evidence for the months before this one, so there are no posts for them.