---
title: "Swarm Dispatch (spawn-collect-die) · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/swarm-dispatch/
description: "A coordinator spawns N ephemeral workers, collects outputs, terminates them. Workers are short-lived and non-communicating."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Swarm Dispatch (spawn-collect-die)

A coordinator spawns N ephemeral workers, collects outputs, terminates them. Workers are short-lived and non-communicating.

Verified against [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18836)

- [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18836)

A swarm-dispatch coordinator spawns N ephemeral workers for a job, collects their outputs, and terminates them, a fan-out and fan-in that exists only for the task. Unlike a standing colony the workers are disposable, which keeps state simple and cost bounded to the job. It suits embarrassingly-parallel work: search a space or process partitions, then reduce. In anatomy terms it is a coordinator core spawning short-lived scoped cores.

## In the anatomy

A coordinator core spawns N short-lived worker cores (map), collects and reduces their outputs (reduce), then discards them; workers hold no durable state; the perimeter gates the coordinator's writes.

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Swarm Dispatch (spawn-collect-die) |
| State model | stateless |
| Example | Fable-5 dispatch· OpenAI parallel tool-calls |

## Common use cases

## Strengths

## Weaknesses

## Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

## Verified against

- [https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18836](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18836)

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.