SOLAR Lab Seminar: Hari Balakrishnan, Glia: A Human-Inspired AI for Automated Systems Design and Optimization

Content

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Hari Balakrishnan

Speaker

Hari Balakrishnan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Description

This talk will focus on how AI can be used to autonomously design and optimize complex systems. This directly ties into the seminar’s theme by showcasing how AI is automating the core tasks of experimental design and execution, bringing an era of reasoning abundance to the systems research lifecycle.

Abstract

Can an AI autonomously design mechanisms for computer systems on par with the creativity and reasoning of human experts? 

We present Glia, an AI architecture for networked systems design that uses large language models (LLMs) in a human-inspired, multi-agent workflow. Each agent specializes in reasoning, experimentation, and analysis, collaborating through an evaluation framework that grounds abstract reasoning in empirical feedback. 

Unlike prior ML-for-systems methods that optimize black-box policies, Glia generates interpretable designs and exposes its reasoning process. When applied to a distributed GPU cluster for LLM inference, it produces new algorithms for request routing, scheduling, and auto-scaling that perform at human-expert levels in significantly less time, while yielding novel insights into workload behavior. 

Our results suggest that by combining reasoning LLMs with structured experimentation, an AI can produce creative and understandable designs for complex systems problems.

Paper