Chaos Fidelity for AI Clusters: a machine-checkable standard for which fault injection tests which layer

Most chaos experiments on AI clusters test the wrong thing, and nobody notices. A pod kill is not an XID. Overlay NetworkChaos is not an InfiniBand flap — and neither is tc/netem on the RDMA NIC, because RDMA bypasses the kernel the way tc works on. A DCGM field injection tests your telemetry pipeline, not your GPU. Get the layer wrong and you certify a recovery behavior that will not fire on the real fault — you retire the risk on paper. Certifying the wrong injection is worse than certifying nothing.

This repository is a standard that makes fidelity mechanical: an eight-layer fault model, a spec schema for a chaos experiment, a linter that fails a wrong-layer experiment in CI with the reason, and a vetted catalog of 20 reference experiments that all pass. It is deliberately narrow, literature-independent, and adoptable — bring your own experiments, run them through the linter, and know that what you certified is what you think you certified.

Part of a series on turning GPU capital into usable compute (see Series). Its companion, the reliability-economics study, prices what these experiments certify in GPU-hours. All factual claims trace to REFERENCES.md.

The problem, in one table

An AI cluster fails on eight layers that each emit a different signal and heal a different way. An injection is only as good as the layer it actually hits:

The full reasoning — including why tc on an RDMA NIC is the overlay-vs-fabric mistake one level deeper, and why DCGM injection certifies the telemetry plane rather than the silicon — is in docs/fidelity-taxonomy.md. The operational how-to (the actual dcgmi commands, the XID→heal map, the Chaos Mesh forms) is the runbook in docs/injection-methods.md.

The two clocks are why the fabric experiment matters: when a rail drops, the InfiniBand transport gives up in ~30 s (NCCL_IB_TIMEOUT, default 20, ×7 retries [11]) while the PyTorch NCCL watchdog default is 600 s [10]. Tune only the watchdog and you tuned the wrong timer.

The standard

Three parts, all in this repo:

1. A spec schema — the contract for a chaos experiment (SPEC.md): its layer, the wanted fault, the injection technique, blast radius, duration cap, abort condition, automated undo, steady-state contract, what it certifies, and (for the governed-autonomy sequel) how far it may be auto-promoted.
2. A linter (catalog/validate.py) that enforces two things and rejects anything that fails:
   • Fidelity — the taxonomy above as machine rules. An IB flap injected on the overlay or via tc/netem, an XID faked with a pod kill, a desync injected with a GPU reset: each fails validation with the reason.
   • Completeness + safety — every spec needs an owner, a duration cap, an abort condition, and an automated undo (missing any one, it is a demo, not an experiment), and physically-stressing techniques (ib-link-down, gpu-burn, chaosd-nic) must be flagged agent_forbidden so no autonomous planner can fire them.
3. A reference catalog — 20 experiment specs across all eight layers (catalog/) that all pass, plus the taxonomy and runbook docs. Copy from it, or lint your own against the same rules.

pip install pyyaml
make test                       # lint the catalog + prove wrong specs are rejected
python3 catalog/validate.py your-experiment.yaml   # lint one of your own

Or install the linter as a command and run it on your own specs anywhere:

pip install git+https://github.com/dimaggi-ai/ai-cluster-chaos-fidelity
chaos-fidelity my-experiment.yaml     # lint one spec (or a directory of them)
chaos-fidelity                        # lint the bundled reference catalog

The linter is the point: a prose taxonomy gets nodded at and violated under deadline; a machine rule fails the pull request. The validator tests prove that hand-written wrong specs — including the subtle tc-on-RDMA case — fail for the stated reason.

The standard is tool-agnostic on purpose: the specs name a technique, not a vendor. Chaos Mesh [1] supplies the Kubernetes-layer forms here, but the same experiments run under Litmus [2] or a cloud fault-injection service [4] when the cluster is managed; ChaosEater [3] is the current precedent for generating specs like these with an LLM — exactly the loop the governed-autonomy sequel governs.

Why a standard, not a checklist

A checklist is advice; a standard is enforcement with an ecosystem. This repo is versioned (SPEC.md carries the version), the schema is stable, and the catalog is meant to grow by contribution — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The honest scope is stated up front, including the failure classes the catalog does not yet cover (SDC, correlated power/cooling, stragglers, checkpoint-store outages) in catalog/README.md — listing them is the alternative to a coverage matrix that looks complete because it is small.

Reproduce

pip install pyyaml
make test                    # validator (20 specs valid) + rejection tests
python3 catalog/validate.py  # lint the whole catalog
python3 catalog/test_validate.py

Python 3.11+, pyyaml. The checks run on every push via CI — a machine-checkable standard must machine-check itself.

Series — turning GPU capital into usable compute

• GPU Cluster Networking — how interconnect bandwidth caps AI training throughput at scale (network-vs-more-gpus)
• GPU Cluster Scheduling — reclaiming stranded capacity across Slurm, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud (scheduler-vs-more-gpus)
• Chaos Fidelity for AI Clusters (this work) — the standard for testing recovery so a certified experiment certifies what it claims
• Reliability Economics (companion, in progress) — prices what these experiments certify: MTTF/MTTR/ETTR and which recovery policy wins in which failure regime
• Governed Autonomy for GPU Clusters and Networks (next) — the controller these experiments certify, from human intent to nanosecond in-ASIC reflexes

Margaret (Maggie) Nanyonga — Founder & Principal Architect, DIMAGGI AI. Governed AI infrastructure: the control, reliability, and audit layer for autonomous systems operating production networks and compute.