Minions: A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices

The increasing demand for GPU-accelerated machine learning inference has exposed limitations in centralized GPU infrastructures, including high cost, limited elasticity, and long wait times under resource constraints. At the same time, modern Apple Silicon–based macOS devices are equipped with powerful GPUs that remain largely idle during normal usage. This paper presents Minions, a dynamic and distributed virtual GPU cloud that aggregates idle Apple Silicon GPUs across macOS devices to execute large-scale machine learning inference workloads. Minions enables teams to leverage existing…