Python API Naming Conventions

These rules apply to every new public op API: any op name added to test/python/api_index/api_index.txt. The graph API (cudnn.pygraph and its enums) is out of scope. Existing names keep working; renaming them is part of the API pruning plan, not this document.

Name pattern

cudnn.ops.<op_name>_<direction>               # PyTorch
cudnn.ops.<op_name>_<direction>_jax           # JAX
cudnn.ops.<op_name>_<direction>_standalone    # no framework

• <op_name>: the operation in snake_case, such as grouped_gemm_glu or sdpa.
• jax: marks the JAX variant. The PyTorch variant has no framework token.
• standalone: marks the framework-free variant, which takes raw device pointers and a stream instead of framework tensors.
• <direction>: forward or backward. Every op has a direction, including an op without a backward.

Each name is a function exported from cudnn.ops or from one of its families. Ops are imperative: forward and backward are separate calls.

Families

A family groups related ops under cudnn.ops.<family>:

cudnn.ops.<family>.<op_name>_<direction>      # plus _jax / _standalone

Make a family when either holds:

• The ops are distinct steps that compose into one model block, such as DSA’s indexer, top-k and sparse attention.
• The ops share public input types, such as GNN’s CscGraph and its aggregation enums.

Otherwise the op stays flat in cudnn.ops. An op with its variants or helpers is still one op: dtype paths, causal_conv1d_update, and the linear-attention *_summary ops stay flat. Being used by the same model is not enough.

Inside a family:

• Drop the family name from the op name: cudnn.ops.dsa.indexer_forward, not cudnn.ops.dsa.dsa_indexer_forward.
• Export the family’s shared types from the family: cudnn.ops.gnn.CscGraph.
• Do not nest families.

Families: dsa (DeepSeek sparse attention, including the CSA/HCA compressor), nsa (native sparse attention) and gnn.

Rules

1. Functions only. Do not export op classes. Exported op classes such as GroupedGemmSwigluSm100 are legacy. Input types such as CscGraph are not ops.
2. No wrapper in names. The function is the framework op; wrapper adds nothing.
3. Spell out the direction. Use forward / backward, never fwd / bwd.
4. Keep implementation details out of names. Do not add an architecture (sm90, sm100, …) or an implementation technology (dsl, cutedsl, frost, triton, …). The function dispatches internally and raises a clear error for an unsupported configuration.
5. Ops live in cudnn.ops. Do not add op APIs to the top-level cudnn package, cudnn.torch, cudnn.jax, or an op package such as cudnn.gemm; a JAX variant is marked by a _jax suffix, and a family is a subpackage of cudnn.ops. Existing exports keep working until the API pruning plan retires them.

Examples