Papers for

cloud infrastructure developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Software platform emulates AI and HPC datacenter racks for development

Cnuas: A Software-Defined AI/HPC Rack-scale Emulation Platform and Hyperscale Data Center Facility Twin

Abstract: Modern AI and HPC systems integrate accelerators, high-speed networks, and management controllers at rack scale. Developing software for this infrastructure typically requires access to scarce, costly hardware, while software abstractions can obscure how workloads depend on resources across servers and accelerators. This paper presents Cnuas, an open-source, experimental rack-scale emulation platform whose baseline architecture follows the Open Compute Project (OCP) Open Rack v3 specifications. Through functional emulation, it supports experimentation, learning and software development within academic and industrial research and development, rather than matching the throughput or latency of physical hardware. Its web-based user interface visualizes racks, devices and their interconnections to help developers build a system-level mental model of the infrastructure supporting their workloads. At its core, CnuasNIC and CnuasSwitch implement a guest-visible remote direct memory access (RDMA) adapter and a host-resident hybrid software switch supporting both RoCEv2 and native InfiniBand. The platform also provides a dedicated AI/ML accelerator (GPU) peer fabric and OpenBMC-based rack management with executable power supply and battery backup firmware over RS-485. These components support the study of device, driver, and firmware interfaces on commodity hosts. The accelerator software stack remains an early research prototype, and facility modeling with OpenUSD is an exploratory extension. The paper presents the architecture, interfaces, and bounded prototype results as a basis for community collaboration across the core platform and its extensions.

Mon 14 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingHardware ArchitectureNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Modern AI and high-performance computing (HPC) systems use lots of specialized hardware packed tightly in racks, which are expensive and rare to access for software development. The authors created Cnuas, a software platform that mimics these racks so developers can experiment and learn without needing the real hardware. It offers tools to visualize how all the parts connect and work together, helping users understand their software’s needs across devices. While it doesn’t match the speed of real systems, it supports exploring device interfaces and rack management in a realistic environment.
Open 2609.15889v1

Ai-powered orchestration improves autonomous 6G mobile network management

Toward Fully Autonomous 6G Networks: AI-driven Operational Efficiency and Optimization

Abstract: Mobile networks evolution is characterized by a substantial increase in system complexity, driven by the need to accommodate a growing number of heterogeneous services on top of the digital infrastructure. This growth in service accommodation is expected to accelerate with the adoption of the Network as a Service (NaaS) paradigm, which has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate network innovation while enabling new revenue streams for operators. Although it is fundamental to abstract network capabilities for third-party developers, it poses significant challenges in terms of efficient network operation. To address this increased complexity, future mobile networks are envisioned to be inherently Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native. In particular, the integration of AI within the Radio Access Network (RAN) becomes a key enabler for optimizing operation, energy consumption, and autonomous network control. In this context, this research explores the convergence of AI-native RAN and NaaS ecosystems to enable autonomous 6G RAN management. We propose an Agentic-based orchestration framework capable of interpreting intent-based policies. The proposed framework becomes key to integrate external NaaS requests with internal network management policies.

Tue 8 SeptNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Mobile networks are becoming more complex as they support many different types of services. The authors look at how future 6G networks can manage themselves more efficiently by using artificial intelligence (AI) built into their radio parts. They propose a new system that can understand high-level goals and balance outside requests with internal rules to run the network autonomously. This approach aims to improve how networks operate and save energy while supporting new business models.
Open 2609.08426v1