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MCP agents in PanDA

  • Paul Nilsson
  • , Joseph Boudreau
  • , Tasnuva Chowdhury
  • , Shengyu Feng
  • , Adolfy Hoisie
  • , Raees Khan
  • , Jaehyung Kim
  • , Ozgur O. Kilic
  • , Scott Klasky
  • , Alexei Klimentov
  • , Tatiana Korchuganova
  • , Tadashi Maeno
  • , Verena Ingrid Martinez Outschoorn
  • , David K. Park
  • , Norbert Podhorszki
  • , Yihui Ren
  • , Frédéric Suter
  • , Sairam Sri Vatsavai
  • , Torre Wenaus
  • , Rui Xue
  • Wei Yang, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The PanDA workload management system, developed for large-scale distributed computing in high-energy physics, is being enhanced through the integration of AI-assisted operational tools built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This paper describes two complementary efforts. The first is PanDA MCP, a FastAPI-based interface layer that exposes PanDA REST APIs as standardized, self-describing MCP tools, bridging the synchronous PanDA backend with asynchronous AI clients. The second is Bamboo MCP, a modular plugin-based toolkit for AI-assisted operations, whose ATLAS plugin implements AskPanDA — a natural-language interface to the PanDA workload management system. Bamboo adopts a tool-first, evidence-driven architecture in which deterministic routing and structured data retrieval precede any LLM invocation. A key new capability enables natural-language queries against a live PanDA job database via an LLM-generated SQL pipeline protected by an AST-based security guard. A supervisor-managed suite of background agents maintains the local data stores on which these tools depend. The toolkit is experiment-agnostic by design, with plugins for ePIC, the Vera Rubin Observatory, and CGSim planned. A GPU-based testbed at Brookhaven National Laboratory supports co-development across the ATLAS and EIC communities.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberC07030
JournalJournal of Instrumentation
Volume21
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2026

Keywords

  • Computing (architecture, farms, GRID for recording, storage, archiving, and distribution of data)
  • Software architectures (event data models, frameworks and databases)

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