For background on what IMEX is and how it relates to NVLink domains on CoreWeave, start with IMEX overview. IMEX (Internode Memory Exchange) is NVIDIA’s mechanism for enabling direct GPU-to-GPU memory access across Nodes within the same NVLink Domain. On NVL72-powered instances, IMEX is required for multi-node workloads that rely on high-bandwidth communication across all Nodes in a rack. CoreWeave has begun using the NVIDIA DRA Driver as its mechanism for assigning IMEX channels to workloads. It provides theDocumentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.coreweave.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
ComputeDomain abstraction which takes care of necessary machinery to present IMEX channels as an allocatable container resources via DRA.
Previously, CoreWeave provisioned IMEX channels transparently via the
nvidia-imex daemonset. With the NVIDIA DRA driver, IMEX channel allocation is on-demand for Pods requesting them.Provisioning ComputeDomains
AComputeDomain defines a logical container for a set of Nodes that are permitted to share an IMEX channel allocation. You create a ComputeDomain in your namespace, and the controller generates a corresponding ResourceClaimTemplate that workloads can reference to obtain access to a shared channel.
Each independent workload should use its own
ComputeDomain. Deploying multiple workloads into a single ComputeDomain works, but may result in unintended memory sharing between them.ResourceClaimTemplate will contain the same name and namespace.
Claiming IMEX channels from a ComputeDomain
AComputeDomain is designed to follow the workload, its Node membership is determined by where Pods land. This means the validity of the resulting IMEX domain depends entirely on scheduling. If Pods spread across Nodes that are not physically connected via NVLink, the workload may not function as expected. For this reason, workloads should always include affinity rules to constrain Pods to Nodes within the same rack.
To claim an IMEX channel, add a resourceClaims entry to your Pod specification that references the ResourceClaimTemplate for your rack. Each container that needs IMEX access must also declare the claim under resources.claims.
Minimal example
Replace
[TEMPLATE-NAME] with the name of the channel defined in your ComputeDomain.Multi-Node example: MPIJob across a full GB200 rack
For full-rack distributed workloads, the following example schedules an MPIJob across all Nodes of a GB200 rack using DRA IMEX.This example requires the MPI Operator to be installed in your cluster.
slotsPerWorker: 4matches the 4 GPUs per Node on GB200 NVL72 systems.replicas: 18covers all Nodes in a single GB200 rack.- The
topologyKey: nvidia.com/gpu.cliqueaffinity ensures all worker Pods land on Nodes within the same NVLink partition: as identified by GPU Feature Discovery.
Verifying resource allocation
After submitting a workload, verify thatResourceClaims are in allocated,reserved state:
- The
ComputeDomainfor your rack is active:kubectl get computedomain -A - The
resourceClaimTemplateNamein your Pod spec exactly matches an availableResourceClaimTemplate - All Pods are scheduled on Nodes within the same
nvidia.com/gpu.cliquedomain