Glia: A Human-Inspired AI for Automated Systems Design and Optimization

Glia is an AI system that autonomously designs and optimizes computer network mechanisms using a human-inspired multi-agent workflow in which specialized agents reason, experiment, and analyze collaboratively. Applied to distributed systems challenges, it produces interpretable designs that rival human expert solutions.

Abstract

Can 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. 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.