Hedgehog Disaggregated Inference Demo with Sergei Lukianov

Hedgehog demonstrated disaggregated inference running across a pair of NVIDIA DGX Spark systems on a Hedgehog AI network and walked through the software stack behind it. Sergei Lukianov, Manish Vachharajani, and Marc Austin also explained how Hedgehog’s Kubernetes-based control plane handles GitOps, tenant-aware observability, EVPN multi-tenancy, multi-fabric interconnects, and fabric bring-up for AI clusters. The session took place at Networking Field Day 41, with Lukianov, Hedgehog’s co-founder and chief architect, leading the demo before Vachharajani and Austin joined him for an extended delegate Q&A.

Lukianov described a stack built on NVIDIA Dynamo for orchestration, vLLM for both prefill and decode, and NIXL over UCX for KV cache transfer, noting that these libraries know little about network topology and expect the fabric to simply work. The demo ran on DGX Sparks, which present the same software environment as B200 servers, attached to Celestica DS5000 Tomahawk 5 switches in Hedgehog’s Fremont lab and running RoCE over an EVPN fabric with host-side BGP for multi-homing. In aggregated mode, almost no traffic crossed between the nodes; once disaggregated, a few gigabits per second of KV cache moved from one Spark to the other, all of it RoCE, which Lukianov said would reach hundreds of gigabits at data center scale. He then showed Hedgehog’s Kubernetes CRD-based API, with VPC objects managed through Argo CD and telemetry enriched with tenant information for Prometheus and Grafana.

In the Q&A, the presenters positioned Hedgehog as a way to extend NVIDIA reference architectures to mixed-vendor accelerators and topologies such as the converged tier, while running EVPN on the back end so any tenant placed in a VPC is isolated automatically. Vachharajani described a gateway that applies ACLs and NAT between VPCs, including the internet, in roughly 20 lines of configuration, and Lukianov previewed a feature arriving the following week for interconnecting separate fabrics with full tenant isolation. Hedgehog ships as an appliance ISO, with a switch agent pulling declarative configuration much as a kubelet pulls pods, and supports Broadcom Enterprise SONiC and Cumulus. An OCP-accepted reference architecture and cabling validation for deployments of roughly 60,000 connections reflect the company’s larger goal of making AI fabric operations accessible to DevOps engineers rather than only networking specialists.