Device API (Experimental)
* Introduces device-side APIs to integrate NCCL communication directly into application kernels.
* Supports LSA (Load/Store Access) for CUDA P2P communication over NVLink and some PCIe platforms.
* Supports Multimem for hardware multicast using NVLink SHARP.
* Adds initial framework for GIN (GPU-Initiated Networking), currently under development.
* Introduces device communicators created using ncclDevCommCreate.
* Enables device-side communication operations with synchronization (ncclLsaBarrierSession) and memory accessors (ncclGetLsaPointer, ncclGetLsaMultimemPointer).
* Experimental APIs - signatures and functionality may evolve in future releases.
* No ABI compatibility is guaranteed — applications must be recompiled with each new NCCL release.
Symmetric memory improvements
* Support for aggregating symmetric operations using ncclGroupStart/End APIs.
* Reimplement symmetric kernels using device API.
New Host APIs
* Introduce new host collective APIs: ncclAlltoAll, ncclScatter, ncclGather.
CE (Copy Engine) Collectives
* Reduce SM utilization for alltoall, scatter, gather, and allgather within a single (MN)NVL domain.
* Free up SM capacity for the application to do computation at the same time.
* To enable the feature for ncclAllGather, ncclAlltoAll, ncclGather, ncclScatter, register buffers into symmetric windows and use the NCCL_CTA_POLICY_ZERO flag in the communicator config_t.
NCCL Inspector Plugin
* Introduces an Inspector plugin for always-on performance monitoring.
* Produces structured JSON output with metadata, execution time, bandwidth, and optional event traces for each NCCL operation.
* Enables integration with analysis tools such as Performance Exporter to visualize NCCL performance bottlenecks.
* Lightweight to enable via environment variables NCCL_PROFILER_PLUGIN and NCCL_INSPECTOR_ENABLE.
CMake support (Experiemental)
* Adds a CMake build system as an alternative to existing Makefiles.
* Known issues: pkg.build and Device API currently do not work with CMake.
* The known issues will be addressed in a future release.
Decreased max CTA count from 32 to 16 on Blackwell
* SM overhead is decreased by 50% with this improvement.
* This may cause some perf drop on Blackwell because of the reduced SM usage.
* If the extra SM capacity is not desired, two options are available to restore to previous behavior: 1) Setting NCCL_MIN_CTAS=32 NCCL_MAX_CTAS=32 environment variables; 2) setting communicator config to over-write max CTA count to 32.
* Based on community feedback, future versions may consider different trade-offs between performance and SM overhead.
Plugins
* Network
* App-aware Network plugin. NCCL passes information about communication operations to be executed on the network end point. This allows for better tuning of network end points and their use in the plugins.
* Improve handling of physical and virtual network devices and load/unload.
* Network plugin version 11 - add explicit context and communication ID support for per communicator init/finalize.
* Add Multi-Request Net API. Using this will help NCCL to anticipate multiple send/recv requests and optimize for it. See maxMultiRequestSize field in ncclNetProperties_v11_t.
* Profiler
* Add support for API events (group, collective, and p2p) and for tracking kernel launches in the profiler plugin.
* Add Inspector Profiler Plugin (see section above).
* Add a hook to Google’s CoMMA profiler on github.
* Tuner
* Expose NCCL tuning constants at tuner initialization via ncclTunerConstants_v5_t.
* Add NVL Domain Information API.
* Support multiple plugin types from a single shared object.
New Parameterization and ncclConfig changes:
* Add new option NCCL_MNNVL_CLIQUE_ID=-2 which will use rack serial number to partition the MNNVL clique. This will limit NVLink domains to GPUs within a single rack.
* Add NCCL_NETDEVS_POLICY to control how NET devices are assigned to GPUs. The default (AUTO) is the policy used in previous versions.
* Add NCCL_SINGLE_PROC_MEM_REG_ENABLE control variable to enable NVLS UB registration in the “one process, multiple ranks” case as opt in.
* Move nChannelsPerNetPeer into ncclConfig. NCCL_NCHANNELS_PER_NET_PEER can override the value in ncclConfig.
* Enable PxN over C2C by default
* PxN over C2C will improve performance for Grace-Blackwell platforms by allowing NCCL to leverage the NIC attached to a peer GPU over NVLINK, C2C, and PCIe.
* This behavior can be overridden by setting NCCL_PXN_C2C=0.
Other Improvements:
* Allow FP8 support for non-reductive operations on pre sm90 devices. (See https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/pull/151594#discussion_r2135777776)
* Fix NVLS+CollNet and temporarily disables COLLNET_CHAIN for >8 GPUs.
* Only consider running interfaces for socket traffic. NCCL will not attempt to use interfaces that do not have the IFF_RUNNING bit. (https://github.com/NVIDIA/nccl/issues/1798)
* Modernize mutex management. Convert to std::mutex and std::lock_guard.
* Remove sm35 and sm50 GENCODE targets which have long been deprecated and were causing issues with the latest NCCL release builds.
* Improved NVLS/NVLSTree tuning prediction to improve algorithm and protocol selection.
* NVLSTree Tuning Fixes. Update tuning data for H100, GB200-NV72.
* Respond better to RoCE link flaps. Instead of reporting an “unknown event” it will now report “GID table changed”.
* Move libvirt bridge interface to the end of possible interfaces so that they are considered last. These interfaces are usually virtual bridges to relay traffic to containers running on the host and cannot be used for traffic to a remote node and are therefore unsuitable.
Add support for bfloat16.
Add ncclAvg reduction operation.
Improve performance for aggregated operations.
Improve performance for tree.
Improve network error reporting.
Add NCCL_NET parameter to force a specific network.
Add NCCL_IB_QPS_PER_CONNECTION parameter to split IB traffic onto multiple queue pairs.
Fix topology detection error in WSL2.
Fix proxy memory elements affinity (improve alltoall performance).
Fix graph search on cubemesh topologies.
Fix hang in cubemesh during NVB connections.
Optimization for Tree allreduce on A100.
Improve aggregation performance.
Use shared buffers for inter-node send/recv.
Add NVTX profiling hooks.
Accelerate alltoall connections by merging communication for all
channels.
Add support for one hop communication through NVLink, for faster
send/recv communication on cubemesh topologies like DGX-1.
Improve alltoall scheduling to better balance intra/inter node
communication.
Increase send/recv parallelism by 8x, each warp sending or
receiving to a different peer.
Net: move to v4.
Net: make flush operation asynchronous to accelerate alltoall.
Net: define maximum number of requests.
Fix hang when using LL128 protocol after 2^31 steps.
Fix#379 : topology injection failing when using less GPUs than
described in the XML.
Fix#394 : protocol mismatch causing hangs or crashes when using
one GPU per node.
Added detection of IBM/Power NVLink bridge device.
Add NUMA support to PCI distance calculations.
Added NCCL_IGNORE_CPU_AFFINITY env var.
Fix memory leaks; GithubIssue#180
Compiler warning fix; GithubIssue#178
Replace non-standard variable length arrays. GithubIssue#171
Fix Tree+Shared Memory crash. GithubPR#185
Fix LL cleanup hang during long running DL jobs.
Fix NCCL_RINGS environment variable handling.
Added extra checks to catch repeat calls to ncclCommDestroy() GithubIssue#191
Improve bootstrap socket connection reliability at scale.
Fix hostname hashing issue. GithubIssue#187
Code cleanup to rename all non device files from *.cu to *.cc
Add tree algorithms for allreduce to improve performance at scale.
Add ncclCommAbort() and ncclCommGetAsyncError() to properly handle
network errors and be permit recover.
Detect initial CPU affinity and no longer escape it.
Add support for inter-node communication using sockets and InfiniBand/RoCE.
Improve latency.
Add support for aggregation.
Improve LL/regular tuning.
Remove tests as those are now at github.com/nvidia/nccl-tests .
Mark Santesson
Sylvain Jeaugey
Ke Wen
Cao Zongyan
David Addison