How to Deploy the 600GB Inkling-NVFP4 Model on GKE Spot A3 Without Crashing

Developers attempting to run the 600GB Inkling-NVFP4 AI model on a cost-discounted Google Kubernetes Engine Spot A3 instance — equipped with 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and 640GB of VRAM — frequently encounter crashes before a single prompt is processed. A key software issue is an ABI mismatch caused by installing bleeding-edge packages like vLLM and Transformers on the default Ray cluster image, which upgrades NumPy to version 2.0 while the base system expects version 1.0, breaking inter-node communication. The recommended fix is to use the official vllm/vllm-openai:v0.26.0 image for both Head and Worker nodes, as it bundles compatible versions of all required libraries and eliminates download timeouts during startup. On the hardware side, the model's weights alone consume roughly 600GB of the available 640GB VRAM, leaving almost no room for the KV Cache — the GPU memory used for short-term context — which defaults to reserving space for up to one million tokens and triggers an Out-Of-Memory crash. Tuning the KV Cache allocation is therefore a necessary step alongside the software environment fix to successfully serve the model in production.
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