CUDA DL Release 26.03

The NVIDIA container image for CUDA Deep Learning is available on NGC.

Contents of the CUDA DL container

The container includes the following (not a complete list):

Driver Requirements

Release 26.03 is based on CUDA 13.2.0. For comprehensive and up-to-date driver compatibility information, please refer to the following documentation:

NVIDIA CUDA Compatibility Guide - Compati.bility information between CUDA versions and driver releases.
CUDA Toolkit Release Notes - Driver version requirements and compatibility matrices.
NVIDIA Drivers Download - Latest NVIDIA drivers.

Key Features and Enhancements

This CUDA DL release includes the following key features and enhancements.

CUDA DL container image is based on Ubuntu 24.04.
NIXL, NVIDIA's high-performance network data transfer library, is now included in inference-level containers.

Announcements

Starting in 26.03, the CUDA DL Inference Devel container includes NIXL, for optimized cross-node data transfers, along with the nixlbench benchmarking tool.
Starting in with the 26.01 release, the CUDA DL Base container is available in four variants optimized for both training and inference use cases
- Introducing inference-runtime and inference-devel container variants, providing size reduction compared to full development images through stub library optimization for CUSPARSE, CUSOLVER, CUFFT, and NVJITLINK.
Starting with 25.08 release, CUDA DL Image will be on CUDA 13.0
Starting with the 25.03 release, NVIDIA provides two CUDA DL images: Developer and Runtime

Known Issues

Certain distributed jobs may encounter UCX errors involving MLX5, in which case we recommend the use of the environment variable as a workaround: UCX_DC_MLX5_AR_ENABLE=n.