Spark Environment Setup

DGX Spark ships a GB10 Grace Blackwell chip: aarch64 CPU, SM121 GPU, 128GB unified memory, CUDA 13. This is a narrower and younger platform than a standard x86 CUDA 12 box, so package selection and ABI matching matter more than usual — the wheel ecosystem for aarch64 + CUDA 13 is still filling in.

When to Use This Skill

• Setting up a fresh Spark box for training or inference.
• Hitting an import error mentioning libcudart, a missing symbol, or a wheel that "installed fine but won't load."
• A framework install (PyTorch, Unsloth, TRL, vLLM, xformers) fails, hangs, or silently falls back to CPU.
• Deciding whether to use an NGC container or bare pip.
• Restoring a working setup after an OS reinstall or a base-image update, needing to re-verify from scratch.