| name | sonic |
| description | Use when working on SONIC whole-body-control training, export, evaluation, serving, GPU routing, validation, or CUDA alignment. |
SONIC
When To Use
Use this skill for NVIDIA GEAR-SONIC whole-body-control workbench changes,
including standalone training, export, evaluation, serving, image routing, and
workflow composition with retargeting or MJLab.
Procedure
-
Confirm the current CLI surface before editing:
npa workbench sonic --help
-
Use train for policy training, export for export artifacts, eval for
evaluation, and serve for runtime serving. Use deploy, status, and
list for operational lifecycle.
-
Route first-party SONIC images through
npa/src/npa/deploy/sonic_image_manifest.json; do not hardcode image tags in
workflows or docs.
-
Keep S3 paths run-scoped so retraining and re-evaluation do not overwrite
previous artifacts.
Three-Tier Contract
- CLI:
deploy, train, export, eval, serve, status, and list.
- SDK/API: keep train/eval/export/serve request construction shared with service
payloads and tests where possible.
- YAML: SONIC workflows live under
npa/src/npa/workflows/skypilot/, including
sonic-train-standalone.yaml, sonic-export.yaml, sonic-eval.yaml,
sonic-export-eval.yaml, and sonic-locomotion-finetuning.yaml.
Routing And Validation
- Use the baked
npa-sonic:0.1.2 image for L40S VM targets.
- Use the host-mounted
npa-sonic:0.1.2-k8s image for RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
Kubernetes targets with NVIDIA GPU Operator mounted drivers.
- SONIC render validation requires RT-capable GPUs. H100 can be useful for
non-render training throughput, but it is not the default render-validation
target.
Gotchas
- Keep
SONIC_GPU_TYPE and SONIC_IMAGE_VARIANT aligned with the image
manifest. Do not assume one image works across VM and Kubernetes targets.
- Known issue: job ID reuse anomaly. Treat it as a deferred investigation unless
the task directly targets scheduler identity handling.
- CUDA 13 alignment is vendor-paced on NVIDIA x86_64 CUDA 13 and is not a
Nebius-blocked item.
Verify
npa/.venv/bin/python -m pytest npa/tests/guardrails/test_skills_index.py -q
The smoke test invokes npa workbench sonic export --help and
npa workbench sonic serve --help so the skill cannot regress to the older
train/eval-only command list.