The open source ecosystem is making it easier for AI enthusiasts and developers to build, customize and run increasingly capable agents locally.
Throughout August, NVIDIA is celebrating the partners and open source communities moving local AI forward, along with the models, applications and tools emerging across the ecosystem. That includes NVIDIA’s latest open models, software and developer tools, plus the accelerated computing, libraries and educational resources that help users get started.
It’s shaping up to be a big month for agents. Follow along for the latest developments in this special-edition NVIDIA Local AI blog series, with new updates added over the coming weeks.
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Tuesday, Aug. 11, 8:00 a.m. PT 🔗
Multiply DGX Spark Performance With NVIDIA Sync Cluster Assistant
New open models such as GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Flash are bringing cloud-level intelligence to local systems, enabling advanced workloads like coding and research agents. Running these larger models, however, can require multiple GPUs or DGX Spark systems working together.
NVIDIA Sync app updates make it easy to cluster multiple DGX Spark systems together, providing the memory capacity, inference performance and training throughput needed to run larger models, faster.
Available for Windows and macOS, NVIDIA Sync automatically detects connected systems, provides private and secure remote access through Tailscale and lets developers launch applications across one or more DGX Spark systems without manual networking or copied terminal commands.
The Cluster Assistant in NVIDIA Sync, automates configuring two or more DGX Spark systems as a high-speed cluster. Developers connect the systems through their NVIDIA ConnectX-7 ports, and NVIDIA Sync configures the network, routes workloads across nodes and monitors system health.
To get started with agentic AI on DGX Spark, check out playbooks on NemoClaw, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent and OpenShell.
See notice regarding software product information.
Tuesday, Aug. 11, 8:00 a.m. PT 🔗
Additional DGX Spark Updates
Arriving later in August are two new exciting features for developers.
DGX Spark will be getting Google Chrome as a native ARM64 Linux build — installed in a single click from the DGX Dashboard. That means Google account sync, the full extension ecosystem, cross-device continuity and all the features that come standard on every other platform are now accessible on your DGX Spark. Sign in once and the browser environment follows from laptop to Spark.
The new NVIDIA Sync Resource Monitor will provide real-time and historical views of CPU and GPU usage across an individual DGX Spark or an entire cluster — without requiring additional monitoring software or setup. At-a-glance visualizations help users track workload progress, check available capacity before adding jobs or models, and quickly identify bottlenecks or unexpected behavior. Marquee zooming lets users move from the big picture to specific moments in a workload, helping them troubleshoot faster and get more from their systems.
Tuesday, Aug. 11, 6:00 a.m. PT 🔗
NVIDIA Introduces Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for Fast, Specialized Agentic Tasks
Today, NVIDIA expanded its Nemotron 3 model family with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a customizable open 30B mixture-of-experts (MoE) model for always-on agents.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning delivers up to 4x faster token generation and 30% faster time to completion compared to open models in its class.
And because Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is open weights, AI enthusiasts and developers can fine-tune it with their own examples to better match specific tasks, interests and workflows. For example, they could train the model to:
- Write in a preferred style: Follow established tones, formats and terminology when writing emails, reports or other documents.
- Learn a specialty: Better understand the language and common tasks associated with areas such as photography, gaming or 3D design.
- Code a certain way: Follow preferred coding conventions, frameworks and testing approaches when writing, reviewing or refactoring code.
Paired with access to apps, files and other tools, these fine-tuned models can power more personalized local agentic AI experiences — from an assistant that helps manage email and calendars, to a smart-home agent that handles everyday routines, to a coding companion that works alongside developers on a local codebase.
NVIDIA collaborated with vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp and LM Studio to provide the best local deployment experience for Nemotron 3.5 Lightning models — offering developers choice of NVFP4 and GGUF format of models. Unsloth also provides day-one support with optimized and quantized models for efficient local deployment via Unsloth Studio.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning runs locally on NVIDIA RTX PCs, NVIDIA DGX Spark and OEM GB10 systems, and NVIDIA Jetson, and scales up to RTX PRO workstations, NVIDIA DGX Station and GB300 deskside systems, data centers and cloud environments. With NVIDIA Blackwell systems available from Acer, ASUS, Dell Technologies, Exxact, GIGABYTE, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Supermicro, users can choose from a wide range of devices and form factors to fit their needs.
As generative AI adoption grows, enterprises are looking for ways to keep rising token costs in check without sacrificing access to frontier intelligence. NVIDIA NeMo Switchyard, an open source routing library, automatically directs each step of an agent workflow to the best-fit model based on accuracy, speed and cost. It also gives developers the flexibility to work across models and providers for different tasks.
Internal benchmarks show that NeMo Switchyard, by routing each step across a system of models, helped maintain frontier-level task completion while reducing benchmark completion cost to roughly one-third of Opus 4.8 alone. NeMo Switchyard is available on GitHub.
Visit the Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, NeMo Switchyard and Jetson AI technical blogs to get started. And to build at the edge, start with Jetson AI Lab tutorials and discover real-world Jetson projects. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is also available through OpenRouter, on build.nvidia.com as an NVIDIA NIM microservice, and through a broad ecosystem of NVIDIA Cloud Partners, post-training platforms, inference platforms and cloud service providers. NeMo Switchyard is available on GitHub.
