Heterogeneous ML accelerator cluster with flexible system resource balance

Aspects of the disclosure are directed to a heterogeneous machine learning accelerator system with compute and memory nodes connected by high speed chip-to-chip interconnects. While existing remote/disaggregated memory may require memory expansion via remote processing units, aspects of the disclosure add memory nodes into machine learning accelerator clusters via the chip-to-chip interconnects without needing assistance from remote processing units to achieve higher performance, simpler software stack, and/or lower cost. The memory nodes may support prefetch and intelligent compression to enable the use of low cost memory without performance degradation.