> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getimpala.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Impala Swarm

> Run an agent swarm on Impala — the harness, the fan-out and the model calls in one place, next to your data.

**Impala Swarm** is a way to run an agent swarm on Impala: a parent agent that fans out into many subagents over a shared context, with the loop itself executing on Impala rather than in your application.

## Why run the swarm here

**Prefix reuse across siblings.** Subagents spawned from one parent share a large prompt prefix — system prompt, tool schemas, the parent's accumulated context. When the loop runs next to the fleet, that KV state is already resident rather than being re-sent and recomputed per child. This is the mechanism described in [Impala Herd](/impala-herd), applied to fan-out.

**Swarm state survives capacity changes.** A long-running swarm outlives the machines it starts on. Impala holds the execution state — the parent context, the subagents in flight, what has already completed — so a run continues across scaling events and instance changes in your cloud instead of starting over.

**Cost per completed task, not per call.** A swarm is the clearest case of the argument in [Run async and open source](/async-inference): nobody is reading the intermediate tokens, dozens of children are in flight, and the only number that matters is what the finished task cost.

## Where it runs

Swarm runs in [Bring your own cloud](/getting-started-infrastructure-setup) deployments, so the swarm's state and every intermediate result stay inside your own VPC and buckets — see [Security & data handling](/security).

## Need help?

Reach out to your Impala contact directly.