AI Systems Atlas

H-11Parallel Swarm

/harnesses/parallel-swarm

Shard a partitionable task across independent agents and merge the results at one aggregation point.

Step-by-step walkthrough4 steps
  1. The task shards into independent slices.
  2. Agents work in parallel with zero coordination.
  3. Results merge at a single aggregation point.
  4. Wall-clock time ≈ slowest shard. Only works when shards truly don’t interact.
Key insight

Wall-clock time collapses to the slowest shard — but only for tasks that genuinely decompose without shared state.

Failure mode

Hidden coupling: if shards secretly depend on each other, the aggregation step inherits every inconsistency at once.

Further reading
RelatedHierarchicalBest-of-NRate limits & backpressureParallel tool calls

Elsewhere in the atlas

Security →Evals →Context →Coding Agents →Tools →Ops →