pact
Promise-based configuration management and admin operations for HPC/AI infrastructure
pact manages post-boot runtime configuration on large-scale HPC/AI clusters and provides the sole admin operations interface to compute nodes — replacing both traditional config management tools and SSH.
On compute nodes, pact-agent is the init system: it supervises all services, manages configuration, and provides authenticated remote access via pact shell.
Key Features
- No SSH needed — pact shell provides authenticated, audited, policy-scoped remote access
- pact-agent as init — boots diskless nodes in <2s, supervises 4-7 services directly
- Acknowledged drift — detected, measured, explicitly handled — never silently converged
- Immutable audit log — every action recorded, any state reconstructible
- Optimistic concurrency — apply first, commit within time window, rollback on expiry
- 10,000+ node scale — streaming boot config, no per-node scrape targets
Architecture Overview
Admin Plane pact CLI / pact shell / AI Agent (MCP)
Control Plane pact-journal (Raft) + pact-policy (IAM/OPA) + Grafana/Loki
Node Plane pact-agent (init + supervisor + observer + shell server)
Infrastructure OpenCHAMI (boot) → pact (config + init) → lattice (scheduling)