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1. Model Introduction

NVIDIA Nemotron3-Ultra is an open frontier reasoning model in the Nemotron 3 family, built for long-running autonomous agents. It is optimized for complex orchestration across coding, deep research, enterprise workflows, and EDA use cases where agents must sustain reasoning across many steps and large context windows. Nemotron 3 Ultra is a 550B parameter hybrid MoE model that activates only 55B parameters per forward pass, delivering frontier reasoning accuracy with high-throughput inference. It supports a 1M token context window so agents can keep conversation history, tool outputs, and plan state in view across persistent workflows. Architecture and key features:
  • Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Architecture (MoE): Combines Mixture of Experts with a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, enabling efficient routing and sequence modeling in a single stack.
  • Long-horizon agentic reasoning: Tuned for agents that plan, call tools, inspect results, recover from failures, and continue working across long task horizons — coding, deep research, enterprise automation, and EDA.
  • 1M token context window: Sustains coherent agent state across extended workflows without re-ingestion.
  • BF16 and NVFP4 quantization: Deployable from multi-node H100 down to a single Blackwell node with NVFP4.
  • Multi-environment RL post-training: Post-trained with reinforcement learning across multiple environments for robust reasoning and reliable agentic behavior.
  • Open weights, open data, open recipes: Customizable for domain-specific agents and deployable across your own infrastructure.
Modalities: Input: text — Output: text Supported GPUs:
  • BF16: 16×H100, 16×H200, 8×B200/B300
  • NVFP4: 4/8×B200/B300, 4×GB200/GB300
Available model variants on HuggingFace:

2. SGLang Installation

Nemotron3-Ultra support is included in the latest stable release.
Command

3. Model Deployment

This section provides a progressive guide from quick deployment to performance tuning.

3.1 Basic Configuration

Interactive Command Generator: select model precision, hardware, tensor parallelism, and common knobs to generate a launch command. The generator only emits a runnable command for combinations that NVIDIA / SGLang have validated. Selecting an unverified tuple (e.g. NVFP4 on H100/H200, BF16 with TP=4 on H100, …) is blocked — the command pane shows an explicit error and the verified support matrix instead of a launch line, so unvalidated commands can’t be copied by accident.

3.2 Configuration Tips

  • Attention backend: H100/H200: Use flash attention 3 backend by default. B200/GB200/B300/GB300: Set --attention-backend trtllm_mha. The flashinfer default breaks the overlap scheduler on Blackwell, so trtllm_mha is required there.
  • Mamba scheduler strategy: Always launch with --mamba-radix-cache-strategy extra_buffer. This hybrid Transformer-Mamba model requires the extra_buffer strategy for correct scheduling of its Mamba state.
  • Mamba backend: The Mamba layers use the Triton SSM kernels by default. For better performance, set --mamba-backend flashinfer to use the FlashInfer Mamba kernels instead.
  • Mamba SSM precision: The SSM state dtype defaults to the model config value. Set --mamba-ssm-dtype float16 to store the Mamba states in FP16, which reduces mamba cache memory without significant accuracy loss.
  • Mamba SSM stochastic rounding: When storing the Mamba states in FP16, add --enable-mamba-cache-stochastic-rounding to round SSM cache writes stochastically and reduce accumulation bias. It requires --mamba-ssm-dtype float16 and CUDA; with the default --mamba-backend triton it additionally requires SM100. Use --mamba-cache-philox-rounds to control the number of Philox rounds (0 uses the backend default).
  • TP support: To set tp size, use --tp <4|8|16>. Recommended pairings:
    • BF16: --tp 16 on H100/H200, --tp 8 on B200/B300
    • NVFP4: --tp 4 or --tp 8 on B200/B300, --tp 4 on GB200/GB300
  • Multi-node BF16 on H100: The 16×H100 BF16 setup spans two nodes. Use --dist-init-addr <head-node-ip>:5000 --nnodes 2 --node-rank <0|1> on each node and keep --tp 16.
  • DP attention: By default the attention layers are tensor-parallel (sharded across all TP ranks). Enabling DP attention (the toggle above, or --dp <N> --enable-dp-attention) instead runs attention as N data-parallel groups: each DP rank serves its own slice of the requests with its own KV cache. --dp must divide --tp.
  • Expert parallel (EP): This MoE only supports ep_size == 1 (off) or ep_size == tp_size. To enable expert parallelism, set --ep <tp> with the same value as --tp.
  • Multi-token prediction (MTP): Enable MTP speculative decoding (the toggle above) for low latency.
  • FP8 KV cache: To enable fp8 kv cache, set --kv-cache-dtype fp8_e4m3. This is enabled by default on the NVFP4 checkpoint.
  • Reasoning parser: Set --reasoning-parser nemotron_3 to enable structured reasoning traces (reasoning_content field in the response).
  • Tool calling: Set --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder to enable tool calling support.

4. Model Invocation

Command

4.1 Basic Usage (OpenAI-Compatible API)

SGLang provides an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Example with the OpenAI Python client:
Example
Output:
Output
Streaming chat completion:
Example
Output:
Output

4.2 Reasoning

The model supports two modes — Reasoning ON (default) vs OFF. This can be toggled by setting enable_thinking to False, as shown below.
Example
Output:
Output

4.3 Tool Calling

Call functions using the OpenAI Tools schema and inspect returned tool_calls. The server must be launched with --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder.
Example
Output:
Output

4.4 Controlling Reasoning Budget

The reasoning_budget parameter allows you to limit the length of the model’s reasoning trace. When the reasoning output reaches the specified token budget, the model will attempt to gracefully end the reasoning at the next newline character. If no newline is encountered within 500 tokens after reaching the budget threshold, the reasoning trace will be forcibly terminated at reasoning_budget + 500 tokens.
Example
Usage example with reasoning_budget=256:
Example
Output:
Output

5. Benchmark

5.1 Speed Benchmark

Test Environment:
  • Hardware: GB200 (4x)
  • Model: nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B-A55B-NVFP4
  • Tensor Parallelism: 4
  • SGLang Version: main branch
  • Model Deployment Command:
Command
  • Benchmark Command:
Command
  • Test Results:
Output

5.2 Accuracy Benchmark

5.2.1 GSM8K Benchmark

Environment
  • Hardware: GB200 (4x)
  • Model: nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B-A55B-NVFP4
  • Tensor Parallelism: 4
  • SGLang Version: main branch
Launch Model
Command
Run Benchmark
Command
Test Results:
Output

5.2.2 MMLU Benchmark

Run Benchmark
Command
Test Results:
Output