When encountered in the MPS client's environment CUDA_DEVICE_MAX_CONNECTIONS sets the preferred number of compute and copy engine concurrent connections (work queues) from the host to the device for that client. The number actually allocated by the driver may differ from what is requested based on hardware resource limitations or other considerations. Under MPS, each server's clients share one pool of connections, whereas without MPS each CUDA context would be allocated its own separate connection pool. Volta MPS clients exclusively owns the connections set aside for the client in the shared pool, so setting this environment variable under Volta MPS may reduce the number of available clients.