vLLM speedup shipped, validator plagued by API throttling

SN97 deployed vLLM for student evaluation, cutting per-round wall-time from ~3 hours to ~30–45 minutes on fresh 8×B200 hardware. UID 244 (will_king_v2) holds the throne with composite score 0.561. However, OpenRouter teacher API throttling (HTTP 429) has stalled rounds repeatedly over the past ~16 hours; per-student checkpointing to survive restarts remains unshipped.

• •vLLM enabled on student-axis benchmark; 19 pending eval backlog clears days instead of weeks.
• •King UID 244 retains title; 9 challengers cleared KL threshold but lost on Pareto gate.
• •OpenRouter Kimi-K2.6 endpoint intermittently throttles; rounds reroll but full checkpoint recovery not yet live.
• •Pod environment forwarding and one-shot publisher script landed to reduce false disqualifications.