Typically stored under /usr/bin on Linux systems, this daemon is run under the same $UID as the client application running on the node. The. nvidia-cuda-mps-server instances are created on-demand when client applications connect to the control daemon. The server binary should not be invoked directly, and instead the control daemon should be used to manage the startup and shutdown of servers.

The nvidia-cuda-mps-server process owns the CUDA context on the GPU and uses it to execute GPU operations for its client application processes. Due to this, when querying active processes via nvidia-smi (or any NVML-based application) nvidia-cuda-mps-server will appear as the active CUDA process rather than any of the client processes.