PCF2: Ministral Publication Confirmation Successor

Status: prospectively frozen on 2026-08-11 before any PCF2 remote mutation, model load, source materialization, or scientific compute.

Authorization and relation to PCF1

PCF1 remains permanently closed with formal result null. Its only started allocation was CPU job 750976, which failed after one second because Newton does not set SLURM_TMPDIR. It performed no model load, H100 work, source materialization, assessor read, candidate generation, or scientific score. Jobs 750977--751004 never started. The immutable failure receipt is SHOHIN_PCF1_TERMINAL_INFRASTRUCTURE_RECEIPT_20260811.json.

After that terminal record was preserved and pushed, the user explicitly authorized a separately named successor in pursuit of Shohin. This document is that authorization boundary. PCF2 is not a replay or relabeling of PCF1: it is a new, independently frozen execution protocol whose scientific contract is byte-for-byte identical to PCF1 and whose only permitted change is the repair of allocation-local scratch orchestration described below.

Immutable scientific contract

PCF2 inherits without alteration every scientific clause of SHOHIN_PCF1_MINISTRAL_PUBLICATION_CONFIRMATION.md, including:

• host mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512 at revision 81eaece1948f3875421d9a45bc55487d10e2d894 and the explicit multimodal loader;
• the exact B1, pair, math, logic/science, and MBPP source hashes;
• source split 2026080811, draft seed 2026080818, revision seeds 2026080815/2026080814, evaluation seed 2026080816, and commit seeds 2026080820/2026080822;
• the same model-owned draft, trained same-family revision, unchanged and self-refinement controls, and learned whole-trajectory commit;
• the same updates, batches, accumulation, ranks, layers, learning rates, contexts, generation lengths, four-arm semantics, and 1,289-row board;
• the same sealed-data firewall and exactly one authorized CPU assessor open;
• no access to the holdout, protected product, or public data; and
• no reopening of NDR1, KCR1, VTE1, the natural-language microcode bridge, the Q35 edit cascade, or small-OLMoE variants.

The sole falsifiable gate is unchanged:

1. unchanged >=387/1289 and every domain nonzero;
2. revision >= unchanged+65 and >= self-refinement+39, with nonnegative per-domain deltas against both controls;
3. learned commit >= revision+13, retains at least 95% of both the revision-correct and unchanged-correct identities, and has nonnegative per-domain deltas against revision; and
4. exact 1289/1289 custody and order, zero assessment truncation, zero malformed selections, complete model/data/runtime/environment/sandbox/ checkpoint/compute hashes, zero retries, and zero holdout/public/product access.

PASS remains the conjunction of every clause. Any scientifically false clause is the final PCF2 FAIL. Either PASS or FAIL stops the phase.

Sole infrastructure repair

Newton advertises node-local /tmp but does not populate SLURM_TMPDIR. Every PCF2 allocation therefore creates exactly one deterministic private directory /tmp/pcf1-${SLURM_JOB_ID}-${SLURM_ARRAY_TASK_ID|scalar}. Before use, the runtime must prove:

• /tmp resolves exactly, is root-owned mode 1777, and is not a symlink;
• the target did not exist and is created owner-only mode 0700 on the same filesystem;
• at least 128 GiB and 150,000 inodes are available;
• an atomic write, fsync, rename, and delete succeeds; and
• the exact owned target is deleted and its parent fsynced on success, failure, signal, and evidence-preservation exits.

Ambient SLURM_TMPDIR is rejected. Cleanup validates the exact job/task path, owner, type, device, and resolved parent before recursive removal; no variable, glob, home root, project root, or Lustre path may be a cleanup target.

Before PCF2 submission, one CPU allocation and one eligible H100 allocation must run pcf2_scratch_canary.sbatch. Each is infrastructure-only: it may test scratch capacity/lifecycle and H100 identity, but must not receive or open a model, source bank, assessor, candidate, or scientific output. Both immutable receipts and independent post-job absence checks are required.

Execution and stop rule

After local tests, immutable runtime packaging, storage re-verification, sandbox re-verification, and both scratch canaries pass, submit exactly one fresh dependency-bound PCF2 graph. Disable Slurm requeue and automatic successors. Preserve any infrastructure failure as terminal evidence; do not convert it into a wrong answer. If the graph reaches scoring, open the sealed confirmation assessor exactly once, write the formal gate, mirror its hashes, and stop. No automatic retry, alternate host, protected split, or successor is authorized after PCF2.