Peers only ever read the CURRENT pages of a rank's compose output — the
prefix comes straight from the IPC-registered KV pool — so the symm
region does not need to hold the whole dense buffer (pool-bound ~2.5 GB
double-buffered slab). It now holds one round of current pages in
merged-span order (extend-cap-bound, ~58-100 MB), and dense buffers
become purely rank-local (plain allocations or the optional local arena;
COMPOSE_SYMM no longer requires COMPOSE_ARENA).
Exchange per compose call: publish my written current pages
dense[page] -> staging[slot i] (slot = the page's batch current index,
identical on every rank, so peers address each other's staging with no
per-batch handshake), cp_symm_barrier, gather peers'
staging[writer][slot] -> dense[page] via the existing src!=dst page
gather. Reuse safety keeps the parity-half distance-2 argument, now on
the staging. Capacity sizing comes from the admission caps
(max_total_extend_tokens / max_batch_requests) with a pool-derived
fallback and the SYMM_HEAP_MB override; overflow fails fast
(batch-logical, hence rank-uniform).
Idea credit: laoyao0822's touched-pages-proportional staging
(906ecbe5d4), rebound onto our barrier-gated, group-agreed transport.
Validated on g0033 8xH200: 151 unit tests; 8-rank GPU byte-exactness
vs compose_v2 across 8 layers (arena on and off, parity halves
exercised); benchmark path e (real protocol) byte-exact, current-page
exchange 0.196 ms vs 0.354 ms compact-AR isolated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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