DRA Topology Provider

The DRA provider discovers NVLink domain membership by reading nvidia.com/gpu.clique node labels set by the NVIDIA GPU Operator’s Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) driver. It is a Kubernetes-only provider that uses in-cluster service account auth — no credentials are required.

Important: The DRA provider produces block topology only (topology/block — NVLink domain membership). It does not discover switch tree topology. If you need both switch tree and NVLink domain topology, use the InfiniBand or NetQ provider instead.

Background: ComputeDomains and MNNVL

On GB200 NVL72 and similar Multi-Node NVLink (MNNVL) hardware, groups of nodes share a high-bandwidth NVLink fabric (1.8 TB/s chip-to-chip). Workloads that span these nodes — distributed training, disaggregated inference — benefit significantly from being placed within the same NVLink domain.

Kubernetes exposes this through ComputeDomains, a DRA-based abstraction that represents a set of nodes sharing an NVLink/MNNVL domain as a first-class scheduling object. The GPU Operator’s DRA driver labels each node with nvidia.com/gpu.clique to encode its NVLink clique membership. Schedulers like KAI Scheduler consume these labels — via Topograph — to make topology-aware placement decisions.

The DRA provider is Topograph’s integration point for this ecosystem. For more background, see:

• Enabling Multi-Node NVLink on Kubernetes for GB200 and Beyond
• Running Large-Scale GPU Workloads on Kubernetes with Slurm
• Running AI Workloads on Rack-Scale Supercomputers: From Hardware to Topology-Aware Scheduling

When to Use This Provider

Use the DRA provider when:

• Your cluster runs Kubernetes with the NVIDIA GPU Operator and DRA support enabled
• You have MNNVL hardware (e.g. GB200 NVL72) and need NVLink domain topology for block-based scheduling
• You are using Slinky (Slurm-on-Kubernetes) with MNNVL nodes

If you also need switch tree topology — for example to express the full fabric hierarchy for topology/tree scheduling — use the InfiniBand or NetQ provider instead.

How It Works

The nvidia.com/gpu.clique labels are applied automatically by the GPU Operator’s DRA driver — these are not manually configured by users.

Topograph reads these labels from the Kubernetes API:

1. Lists all nodes (filtered by nodeSelector if provided)
2. For each node with a nvidia.com/gpu.clique label, reads the clique ID and groups nodes by domain
3. Returns the NVLink domain map as block topology

If no nodes with matching labels are found, Topograph returns a 502 error with a diagnostic message indicating which label and annotations to check.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster with the NVIDIA GPU Operator deployed and DRA support enabled
• Nodes must have nvidia.com/gpu.clique labels — applied automatically by the DRA driver

Parameters

Configuration

No credentials are required. The provider uses the in-cluster service account automatically.

Set provider: dra in your Topograph config:

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http:
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  port: 49021
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  ssl: false
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provider: dra
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engine: k8s

For Slinky (Slurm-on-Kubernetes) deployments:

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http:
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  port: 49021
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  ssl: false
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provider: dra
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engine: slinky

To filter participating nodes via nodeSelector, pass parameters in the topology request payload:

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{
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  "provider": {
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    "name": "dra",
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    "params": {
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      "nodeSelector": {
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        "nvidia.com/gpu.present": "true"
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      }
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    }
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  },
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  "engine": {
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    "name": "k8s"
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  }
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}

Verifying the Output

After triggering topology generation, inspect the node labels applied by Topograph:

$
kubectl get nodes -o json | jq '.items[].metadata.labels | with_entries(select(.key | startswith("network.topology.nvidia.com")))'

If topology generation returns a 502 error, check that the expected nodes have the nvidia.com/gpu.clique label and the topograph.nvidia.com/region / topograph.nvidia.com/instance annotations (the latter two are set by Topograph itself during topology discovery):

$
kubectl get nodes -o json | jq '.items[] | {name: .metadata.name, clique: .metadata.labels["nvidia.com/gpu.clique"], region: .metadata.annotations["topograph.nvidia.com/region"], instance: .metadata.annotations["topograph.nvidia.com/instance"]}'

See the Kubernetes engine documentation for details on the label schema.