Hierarchical Server Architecture for Agentic Science

Agentic science is transforming the landscape of computational work, and is applied to scientific pipelines and workload managers. Scientific workloads require specialized hardware within and between institutions. Automated resource discovery is an essential step for scheduling workloads with specific hardware and environmental requirements. In this paper, we present a hierarchical, dynamic architecture and accompanying software to discover resources across diverse cloud, edge, and HPC systems. The design enables concurrent, asynchronous negotiation, selection, and dispatch of requests for work using secretary agents. The agents probe and discover 51 real and simulated providers across 7 categories. We perform 19,973 negotiation and 6,952 selection simulations to assess reliability of decisions, demonstrating high (87.71%) negotiation accuracy and selection costs comparable to more traditional strategies. Designed for extensibility and currently supporting the US DOE Genesis Mission, this architecture exemplifies the importance of careful coordination between agents, discovery tools, and infrastructure for agentic science.