28 parallel alpha-feature chunks × ~3GB each = 84GB peak at merge. Capping at 8 threads keeps peak at ~24GB (well within 96Gi limit) while still saturating I/O. This is a one-time cost — after the cache is populated on the PVC, subsequent runs skip entirely. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>