ViT and Aligner are replicated per TP rank, encoding each image eight
times with TP8 on both CP1 and CP8. Elect one owner per image and use
ordered full-span broadcasts with a six-phase agreement protocol.
Both CP1 and CP8 benefit while local cache hits preserve collective order.
The CP runner bypassed the vision merge and used bare text embeddings.
Merge image features before sharding so request-global offsets stay valid.
Canonicalize model IDs separately to preserve scheduler hash IDs.
Keep unsupported combinations guarded and isolate embedding overrides
from multimodal prefills without starving queued FCFS requests.