Mooncake | NIXL Documentation

Overview

The Mooncake backend uses the Mooncake Transfer Engine for VRAM and DRAM transfers in Mooncake-enabled deployments. Use it in environments running the Mooncake distributed infrastructure.

Property	Value
Transfer Type	VRAM ↔ VRAM; VRAM ↔ DRAM; DRAM ↔ DRAM
Protocol	Mooncake Transfer Engine
Best For	Mooncake distributed infrastructure deployments

Installation

The Mooncake backend requires the Mooncake Transfer Engine shared library to be installed before building NIXL.

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/kvcache-ai/Mooncake.git
cd Mooncake
bash dependencies.sh
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON
make -j
sudo make install

You must build with -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON to produce the shared library required by the NIXL Mooncake backend.

For the latest installation instructions, see the Mooncake repository.

See Configuration for build options.

Configuration

Environment Variables

Variable	Type	Default	Description
`NIXL_MOONCAKE_IP_ADDR`	String (IP)	First non-loopback interface IP	Override IP address for the Mooncake transport engine. Set this when auto-detection selects the wrong network interface.

Build Options

Option	Default	Description
`disable_mooncake_backend`	`false`	Disable Mooncake backend.

When to Use

Deployments running the Mooncake distributed infrastructure
Workloads where the Mooncake Transfer Engine is the preferred transport over UCX