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Cortex Overview

Cortex is a high-performance runtime for running autonomous agents. It handles process isolation, resource enforcement, capability permissions, and lifecycle management — so your agent code doesn't have to.

Built with a Rust-native core (v2.5.10), Cortex is designed to handle thousands of concurrent agents with sub-millisecond orchestration overhead and cold starts under 5 seconds.

Key Features (v2.5.10)​

  • ⚡ Turbo Mode: A high-concurrency task scheduler that enables 3-5x parallel speedup for agent sequences and tool execution.
  • 🧠 Shared KV Cache: Dramatically reduces memory footprint for multi-agent swarms by sharing common context tokens across agent instances.
  • 🛡️ Secure Sandboxing: Hard CPU/RAM ceilings and capability-based permissions ensure agents remain isolated and safe.
  • 📦 Portable Bundles: .cortex archives package logic, prompts, and dependencies for identical execution across dev, staging, and production.
  • 📊 Real-time Telemetry: Native support for p99 latency tracking and structured JSON logging.

What it does​

Agents defined in a cortex.yaml manifest run inside isolated sandboxes. Each agent gets:

  • Resource Limits: A hard CPU and RAM ceiling — it cannot starve other agents or the host system.
  • Capability Isolation: Network access, filesystem access, and tool use must be explicitly granted in the manifest.
  • Lifecycle Control: Start, stop, suspend, resume, and health check without writing orchestration code.
  • Global KV Store: Access to a high-speed, shared key-value cache for inter-agent state sharing.

Architecture​

        Your Application (SDK/CLI)
                  │
                  ▼
┌───────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Cortex Runtime               │
│      (Rust Engine + Tokio Scheduler)      │
│                                           │
│  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐ │
│  │  Agent A │  │  Agent B │  │  Agent C │ │
│  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  └──────────┘ │
│         │            │             │      │
│         └──────┬─────┴─────────────┘      │
│                ▼                          │
│        Shared KV Cache (Turbo)            │
└───────────────────────────────────────────┘
                  │
                  ▼
      External APIs & Infrastructure

Cortex + ICE​

Cortex and ICE are independent — you can use either without the other. But they compose directly:

  • Cortex manages agent execution — isolation, resources, lifecycle.
  • ICE manages agent memory — session context, retrieval, multi-tenant history.

When used together, each Cortex agent leverages ICE for unbounded memory horizons while Cortex ensures the agent's execution is efficient, parallelized, and secure.

Source​

Cortex is open source. The repository, issue tracker, and contribution guide are at github.com/dopove/cortex.