#nim

Harnesses

Picking the Hermes Brain on a DGX Spark — When Throughput Stops Being the Answer

The Hermes serving-lane bakeoff couldn't pick a winner: all five lanes cleared the tool-call format bar. A graded brain-quality rubric breaks the tie — and shows the fastest serving lane is also the better agent, by a margin throughput could never have measured.

uses fieldkit.evalfieldkit.harness

Harnesses

The Hermes Serving Lane on a DGX Spark — MoE vs Dense, and the Number That Actually Picks the Lane

Five Hermes serving lanes on one DGX Spark: Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE vs Qwen3-32B dense across vLLM, llama.cpp, and NIM. The MoE runs ~8.5× faster for the same memory — but the lane is picked by tool-call reliability, which took two config fights to get to 0% everywhere.

uses fieldkit.capabilitiesfieldkit.harnessfieldkit.nim

Harnesses

The Hermes Harness on a DGX Spark — A Local Cockpit That Holds Tools, With No API Key

Installing the Hermes agent harness on a DGX Spark and running the first local agent turn against the cached Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 NIM — reliable tool calls, no API key, no cloud hop. The defensible angle is NIM-first; everyone else's Spark Hermes write-up leads with Ollama.

uses fieldkit.nimfieldkit.capabilitiesfieldkit.harness

Frontier Scout

ClawGym on Spark — A 7B Base, A LoRA Adapter, and the +15 pp the Adapter Earned

ClawGym shipped only a .github profile, so we built the substrate ourselves — persona task synth, sandbox harness, 200-task corpus, LoRA SFT, matched-base eval. The adapter earns +3.8 pp task pass and +15.0 pp per-assertion against its own base. The diagnostic is the lift.

uses fieldkit.nim

Frontier Scout

AutoResearchBench on Spark — Two NIMs, One Bench, Two Failure Modes

Two Spark-tuned NIMs run AutoResearchBench's three Deep-Research example questions. Llama-3.1-8B crashes by turn 5-6 on its 8K context; Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 finishes cleanly at 128K. Both score 0% Accuracy@1 — for completely different reasons.

uses fieldkit.nimfieldkit.evalfieldkit.capabilities

Machine that Builds Machines

The Autoresearch Loop — 50 Iterations of an LLM Editing Its Own Trainer Overnight

NIM Llama 3.1 8B drives a structured-perturbation agent loop against a 354M GPT pretrain. 50 iterations, 73.4 min wall, 0.07 kWh of electricity. 8 keeps, 42 reverts, 0 rail blocks, 0 crashes. Best result: val_bpb 10.8534, +0.93% over baseline at d_model=768.

Second Brain

Second Brain as a Tool — Wrapping the RAG Stack in MCP for Claude Code

Closing the Second Brain arc. Four MCP tools wrap the RAG chain — embed, retrieve, optionally rerank, generate — and any Claude Code session anywhere on the box becomes a grounded research client. 200 lines of Python, one launcher, one .mcp.json entry.

Foundations

Three Endpoints, One Answer — Naive RAG on a DGX Spark

Three endpoints in one curl chain — a query embeds through Nemotron, pgvector returns top-5 chunks in under 80 ms, and a Llama 3.1 8B NIM stuffs them into a strict-context prompt. The chain works; the 8B generator still refuses on questions its own context answers.

uses fieldkit.ragfieldkit.eval

Foundations

Your Own Semantic Space — a Nemotron Embedding NIM on a DGX Spark

The embedding endpoint that every downstream RAG, wiki, and agent piece will reuse — a 2048-dim Nemotron Retriever NIM running locally on GB10, ready 52 seconds after docker run and holding 28 docs/s under batched load.

uses fieldkit.rag

Foundations

Your First NIM on a DGX Spark — What 24.8 Tokens Per Second Doesn't Tell You

First-contact notes on NVIDIA's DGX-Spark-specific Llama 3.1 8B NIM. 9.4 GB image, ~108 s warm-cache cold-start, 24.8 tok/s steady, OpenAI-compatible on :8000 — and a confidently wrong Python one-liner that clarifies what small-model FP8 buys and what it costs.

uses fieldkit.nim