Control Room: A central system to track and stop model workloads across our research infrastructure

As our models get more powerful and the associated safety and security risks become bigger, it becomes more and more critical that we can detect potential issues, and quickly stop models in their tracks when needed. To solve this, we built Control Room.

Control Room is a central system to track model workloads across our research infrastructure and stop them quickly when safety or security concerns arise. It connects every research inference workload, including agentic sampling for model training and evaluation, data processing, and more. This works together with our misalignment monitoring systems, and halts model output within 35 seconds of a decision to intervene to stop or pause a job. It has been built to keep working even when other systems fail, and to stop model output if Control Room itself goes down.

Control Room is already deployed across our research infrastructure, where the need is greatest. Our external model-serving stack is already much more centralized by nature, with a well-developed operational capability to quickly take down model deployments if needed.

How it works

Control Room works by integrating a few systems: the workload, the inference engine, and the centralized Control Room service.

Control Room is integrated in the following way:

• When starting a new job, the workload code requests a new job_id from Control Room.

• Whenever the workload needs to sample tokens from a model, it makes a request to an inference engine running that model, passing the job_id. The engine requests permission from Control Room to fulfill that request, passing the job_id along to Control Room.

• Control Room checks whether that job has been terminated, and if so, it denies the inference request. The engine responds to the workload's inference request with a refusal, stopping further model output from being produced for that job.

Example: reacting to a monitoring alert

Control Room and our monitoring system are integrated in the following way: