jobd MCP server

jobd

A self-hostable, GPU-aware job broker for your own machines — with native MCP/agent integration.

Like task-spooler or pueue, but across all your machines — and VRAM-aware.

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.musharna/jobd -->

You have a couple of boxes with GPUs — a workstation, a server, maybe a laptop — wired together over Tailscale or a LAN. You want to fire off training runs, data pipelines, and long batch jobs from anywhere, have them land on whichever machine actually has the VRAM free, survive across sessions, and get preempted cleanly when something more important shows up. You don't have a cloud, a Kubernetes cluster, or a Slurm install, and you don't want one.

jobd is that missing piece: a small broker that turns a handful of personal machines into a single queue — and an LLM agent can drive it directly.

# from any machine on your tailnet:
job submit --project myproj --gpu --vram-required 16 --wait -- python train.py
# → routed to whichever worker has ≥16 GB VRAM free, streamed back to your terminal

Why it exists

Most schedulers assume a datacenter. The lightweight ones that don't (a bare nohup, a tmux session, an ssh-and-pray script) give you nothing: no queue, no VRAM-aware routing, no preemption, no record of what ran where. jobd fills the gap between "ssh in and run it" and "stand up Slurm":

• VRAM-fit routing. The broker matches each job against live worker capacity (free VRAM / RAM / CPUs, capability tags, arch/OS) and dispatches to a worker that actually fits — instead of you guessing which box is free.
• Preempt + checkpoint. A higher-priority job can preempt a running one: the worker sends SIGTERM, the workload gets a grace window to checkpoint, then SIGKILL. A preempted job reaches a terminal preempted state with a durable checkpoint to resume from — it isn't silently re-run. (See docs/preemption.md.)
• Survives sessions. Submit, close your laptop, check back tomorrow. Jobs live in the broker, not your shell.
• Agent-native. Ships a first-class MCP server so an LLM agent (Claude Code, etc.) can submit, monitor, and babysit jobs as tool calls — the thing most schedulers bolt on as an afterthought, if at all.
• Yours. One broker process you run on a machine you own. No accounts, no egress, no per-GPU-hour billing. Tailnet-bound by default.

Why not just use…?

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.