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Lab Notebook · Inter-Process Wire

NovaP — 15 bytes a token, and why the plumbing mattered more than the demo

NovaP is a binary IPC protocol built for the GPU-inference stack: 15 bytes per token against roughly 200 for an equivalent JSON message, over a lock-free ring buffer. Unglamorous, and load-bearing for every token-throughput number built on top of it.

JR
Jon RossFounder, vocabotics — 15 years building safety-critical systemsLab report · dated 1 February 2026
Verified by a human. Drafted with AI, verified by a human. Jon Ross, 1 Feb 2026
Living document. Reviewed 1 Feb 2026
Entry date
1 February 2026
Category
Inference
Lead over the world
a working baseline, not a lead
Access
🔒 Protected
ResearchProven

No demo, no screenshot — just 15 bytes a token instead of 200, and every token-throughput number upstream of it depends on that number holding.

15 bytes
per token, vs. ~200 bytes for an equivalent JSON message (13.3x)
~104x
faster than a comparable TCP-based approach, for this workload
24
tests

Honest evaluation

Proven

Proven for the specific SPSC workload and JSON/TCP baseline measured — not a general claim against every real-time IPC approach.

What we learned — a preview

The honest edges are open even when the engine is not. The full report — what it was, what we built, and the measured internals — is protected.

  • The 104x and 13.3x figures are workload-specific micro-benchmarks against a naive JSON/TCP baseline, not a claim of beating every real-time IPC approach in general.
  • A lock-free single-producer/single-consumer ring buffer constrains the topology it can serve — it is not a general multi-producer message bus.
  • There is a second, unrelated project in the archive also named "NovaP" — a sensor wire format (magic bytes NVP1) for the Novaterra wearable hardware family, with no relationship to this GPU-inference IPC protocol beyond the shared name and a house habit of reaching for binary-over-generic on a hot path. See the sensor one at /lab/novap-sensor-wire-protocol if that's what you were looking for.
Protected report

The deep body of “NovaP — 15 bytes a token, and why the plumbing mattered more than the demo” is behind access.

We open the demos, the specs, and the method; we protect the engines, the model internals, and anything that touches commercial, safety-critical work. This report describes an engine — so its details are gated, and no client, company, or project is named. Members can read it in full; if you have a genuine reason to see it, tell us who you are and why.

Proofs & sparks

We demonstrate rather than assert. Each ✅ proof is a visible result with a hard figure.

  • Binary IPC wire protocol~104× vs JSON/TCPa purpose-built binary IPC wire protocol over a lock-free ring buffer — benchmarked at ~104× a naive JSON/TCP baseline on the inference hot path.

Where this connects

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