NVIDIA Run:ai Is Now Open Source as Part of NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform

NVIDIA is making the full NVIDIA Run:ai platform available as open source software, giving customers, developers, and ecosystem partners access to production-grade AI workload and GPU orchestration capabilities. This release expands the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform by establishing NVIDIA Run:ai as an open foundation that enables the broader ecosystem to bring differentiated solutions to market faster in response to evolving customer needs.

Over the past several years, NVIDIA Run:ai has helped organizations run AI workloads on Kubernetes at scale by dynamically allocating GPU resources and managing workloads across the full lifecycle, from data processing and training to inference.

By open sourcing NVIDIA Run:ai platform capabilities as part of NVIDIA DSX AI Factory, it is now possible for every NVIDIA DSX ecosystem partner and AI cloud to increase workload throughput, improve GPU utilization, and operate shared AI infrastructure more efficiently and effectively.

This post details the open source release, which includes the complete NVIDIA Run:ai platform and four components that can also be adopted independently: KAI Scheduler, GPU Fractioning Operator, KAI Resource Management, Workload Map. Together with additional platform code, these components form the integrated NVIDIA Run:ai platform. Platform teams and ecosystem partners can adopt NVIDIA Run:ai as an integrated whole, build on it for their own products and services, or integrate individual components based on their requirements.

How to adopt open source NVIDIA Run:ai

NVIDIA Run:ai can be adopted directly as open-source software or through NVIDIA DSX ecosystem partner offerings.

Deploy the open source platform directly

The complete source code for NVIDIA Run:ai is available in the NVIDIA Run:ai repository within the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory GitHub organization. Teams can inspect the code, contribute to its development, build on top of the platform or adopt its modular components independently.

The complete open source NVIDIA Run:ai platform is also available on NVIDIA NGC as a Community Product, with a Helm chart for installing the integrated stack.

Note: The NVIDIA Run:ai source code is governed by its applicable open source licenses. Downloading the Community Product from NGC requires acceptance of the applicable NVIDIA Software License Agreement and Product-Specific Terms for NVIDIA AI Products. No paid NVIDIA Run:ai subscription or NVIDIA support entitlement is required for the Community Product, and NVIDIA enterprise support is not included.

Adopt open source NVIDIA Run:ai through NVIDIA DSX ecosystem partners

Open source NVIDIA Run:ai gives NVIDIA DSX ecosystem partners direct access to AI workload and GPU orchestration innovations they can use in their own NVIDIA DSX AI factory solutions. By adopting the complete platform or integrating individual components, partners can bring those innovations to market faster and respond more quickly to evolving customer and operational requirements.

• Crusoe integrates NVIDIA Run:ai with Crusoe Managed Kubernetes, combining GPU workload orchestration with managed Kubernetes and GPU infrastructure.
• Mirantis extends k0rdent AI with NVIDIA Run:ai to deliver a lifecycle-managed, Metal-to-Model AI factory stack that automates infrastructure provisioning and maximizes GPU utilization.
• Nebius offers NVIDIA Run:ai as a one-click application deployment in Nebius AI Cloud, giving customers a streamlined way to deploy and operate the complete platform on Nebius Managed Service for Kubernetes.
• OpenNebula Systems integrates NVIDIA Run:ai with the OpenNebula AI Cloud Platform through OneKS, combining GPU workload orchestration with infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management for open and sovereign AI clouds.
• Rafay is expanding its NVIDIA Run:ai integration to deliver it as a fully managed service. Rafay automates the entire stack, from GPU infrastructure and clusters to the NVIDIA Run:ai control plane and tenants, so AI cloud providers and enterprises can offer it through their own self-service catalogs.
• Saturn Cloud integrates NVIDIA Run:ai to help AI cloud operators launch white-label AI inference services through its Token Factory platform, combining GPU orchestration with dedicated and multi-tenant model serving, per-token metering, and automated billing.
• Spectro Cloud integrates NVIDIA Run:ai into PaletteAI, enabling customers to deploy it through PaletteAI Studio and manage it with the same lifecycle automation used across their AI infrastructure.
• vCluster provides NVIDIA Run:ai through pre-validated deployment templates that stand up a complete environment per tenant, allowing operators to strengthen tenant boundaries while NVIDIA Run:ai continues to schedule across one GPU fleet.

For NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory deployments, NVIDIA Run:ai continues to be available through NVIDIA-supported commercial offerings including as a standalone product, through NVIDIA Mission Control and NVIDIA AI Enterprise, and select cloud marketplaces. Availability, licensing, and support terms vary by offering.

Modular open source components of the NVIDIA Run:ai platform

This section details the four components included in the open source release: KAI Scheduler, GPU Fractioning Operator, KAI Resource Management, and Workload Map. With additional platform code, these components form the integrated NVIDIA Run:ai platform. You can adopt NVIDIA Run:ai as an integrated whole or integrate individual components based on your unique requirements.

KAI Scheduler: The scheduling engine behind NVIDIA Run:ai

KAI Scheduler is the Kubernetes-native scheduler that powers the NVIDIA Run:ai platform. NVIDIA released KAI Scheduler as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license and contributed it to CNCF as a Sandbox project. KAI remains the upstream engine behind NVIDIA Run:ai, and all scheduler development happens in the community repository, so every improvement flows through the same codebase.

KAI Scheduler is purpose-built for GPU workloads at scale, coordinating:

• Gang scheduling with prescheduling in-memory simulation, so multipod jobs are placed all-or-nothing and aren’t evicted needlessly
• Fair-share (including time-based fair-share) and quota allocation that keeps resource shares balanced across teams
• Topology awareness and bin-packing at the scheduling-decision level
• GPU sharing, which allows multiple workloads to share single or multiple GPUs (MIG, MPS, time sharing, HaMi, CUDA 13.4 MPS fractioning)
• Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) support

GPU Fractioning: An operator for GPU fractions on Kubernetes

GPU Fractioning Operator brings CUDA-native GPU fractioning to Kubernetes and the proprietary implementation has been retired in favor of the native capability available in CUDA 13.4. The CUDA driver enforces a hard limit on GPU memory for each workload, and each workload sees only the GPU memory allocated to its fraction. What is still needed is a clean way to consume it on Kubernetes. This is what GPU Fractioning Operator provides: an operator that enables CUDA GPU fractions on a cluster, along with a metrics exporter for per-pod visibility into fractions in use. It is a Kubernetes integration layer that allows workloads to use CUDA-native fractioning, and it is scheduler-agnostic.

KAI Resource Management: The organizational layer

While the scheduler decides how work is placed, KAI Resource Management governs who gets what:

• Projects and departments: The organizational structure, or “org layer,” that maps resources to the teams and initiatives that consume them.
• Resource management with an organizational hierarchy: The ability to allocate, guarantee, and share GPU capacity across that org structure, with fair-share and quota semantics.
• Node pools: Grouping and targeting of heterogeneous hardware so workloads land on the right resources.

Workload Map: A workload-management contract for Kubernetes

Workload Map is the contract NVIDIA Run:ai uses to support any workload type. KAI Scheduler uses it for scheduling and gang semantics; the rest of the platform uses it for workload discovery, monitoring and lifecycle management.

Workload Map provides a consistent way to treat these workloads as first-class objects throughout their lifecycle:

• Describing pods, components, and roles
• Submitting and configuring
• Scheduling with gang and topology awareness
• Observing status and health consistently
• Applying policy at admission or runtime

Related open source platform software

The following open source projects address complementary AI infrastructure challenges. They can be adopted independently or incorporated into broader solutions that include the complete NVIDIA Run:ai platform or selected components.

Model Streamer: Reducing cold-start latency

Cold-starting an inference workload on Kubernetes can take several minutes, during which time GPUs are allocated but idle for a single step: loading model weights from storage onto the GPU. Model Streamer reads weights concurrently and streams them directly into GPU memory, cutting load time for large models.

Grove: One API, any inference architecture

Emerging workload patterns—including agentic pipelines, disaggregated serving and mixture-of-experts training—consist of multiple connected components that must scale together. Grove provides a Kubernetes API for orchestrating these workloads, from a single pod to deployments spanning tens of thousands of GPUs.