Volcano on Together GPU clusters

Volcano is a Kubernetes-native batch scheduler. Its key property is gang scheduling: a group of pods is placed all-at-once or not at all, so distributed training never starts with only some workers running. Use it when a job needs N pods to run together or not at all.

Public cookbook: https://docs.together.ai/docs/volcano-on-gpu-clusters. Pair this skill with the together-gpu-clusters skill, which covers creating the cluster and configuring kubectl.

Preconditions

• A Together Kubernetes GPU cluster in the Ready state, with kubectl pointed at it (tg beta clusters get-credentials <cluster_id> --set-default-context).
• GPU nodes expose nvidia.com/gpu; the NVIDIA device plugin is preinstalled on Together clusters. Confirm with:

kubectl get nodes -o custom-columns='NODE:.metadata.name,GPU:.status.allocatable.nvidia\.com/gpu'

Install

Pin the version. Do not use master.