ddpsrun

Submit a GPU job. Get results back. No kubectl, no cloud account, no VM to babysit.

ddpsrun is the front door to PACSrun, a Kubernetes-native batch job system that rents GPUs from whichever vendor is cheapest for the shape you asked for — AWS, GCP or RunPod — runs your code there, and puts the results in object storage. You describe the job; you never see the machine.

$ ddpsrun login <token>
$ ddpsrun estimate -f job.yaml
$ ddpsrun submit -f job.yaml
$ ddpsrun logs <job-id> --follow

Why it exists

A researcher who wants a GPU for two hours has three bad options today: get a cloud account and learn its console, get kubectl access to somebody's cluster, or ask a person. Each of those teaches infrastructure to somebody whose job is not infrastructure.

The alternative here is that a batch job is the unit. You hand over a job description and a program. The platform decides which machine to rent, rents it, runs your code, brings the output home, and hands the machine back. When it goes wrong you get an exit code and a sentence, not a half-configured VM.

Install

pip install ddpsrun

Two dependencies, requests and PyYAML, and that is deliberate: this package installs next to your research code, so every extra dependency is one that can fight with something you have pinned. No click, no rich, no pydantic.

Python 3.9 or newer.

Configure

ddpsrun needs a server URL and a token. Ask whoever runs your deployment for both.

$ export DDPSRUN_SERVER=https://<your-gateway-url>
$ ddpsrun login <token>

login writes them to ~/.config/ddpsrun/config.json with mode 0600, or to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ddpsrun when that is set. For CI, where a file is the wrong shape, set DDPSRUN_TOKEN in the environment and skip login entirely.

The commands

Exit codes are contractual: 0 it worked, 1 the server refused or a validate finding would stop the job, 2 the command was wrong or there are no credentials.

Writing a job

A job description is YAML:

image: nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:24.10-py3
command: ["/bin/bash", "-c"]
args:
  - |
    python train.py --epochs 3
resources:
  gpus:
    name: L4
    count: 1
resultPath: s3://<your-bucket>/runs/my-experiment/

Run ddpsrun schema for every field and ddpsrun explain for what your deployment allows.

Do not guess the GPU or the runtime. ddpsrun estimate answers both from measured data, and guessing is how a job ends up on a card several times more expensive than it needed.

Using it from an AI coding agent

This repository ships a Claude Code plugin. It teaches an agent five steps: read what the deployment allows, read your repository against the script contract, estimate rather than assume, validate and stop on a finding, and submit only after you approve.

/plugin marketplace add ddps-lab/pacsrun-gw
/plugin install ddpsrun

The plugin's reference documents are in agent/references/. The one worth reading yourself is script-contract.md: a list of the ways a long training run dies in its last minute, each one taken from a run that did.

What this is not

• Not an interactive machine. There is no SSH and no shell into a running job. You submit a program and read its output. If you need to poke at a live container, this is the wrong tool today.
• Not a scheduler you host. ddpsrun is a client. Somebody has to run the gateway and the PACSrun operator; see docs/ if that somebody is you.
• Not free of limits. A job's credentials for writing results last twelve hours, which is AWS's hard maximum for a role session and not a setting anyone can raise. A run longer than that must checkpoint and resume, and the driver warns half an hour before the deadline.

Repository layout

Development

$ pip install -e 'cli/[dev]'      # the client
$ pip install -e 'server/[dev]'   # the gateway
$ pytest cli/tests server/tests

Both halves live in one repository so the two sides of an API change land in one commit. They share nothing else: the client never imports the Kubernetes libraries, and the server never imports the browser login flow.

No account identifiers in this repository. Documents and code use placeholders — <ACCOUNT_ID>, <RESULT_BUCKET> — and CI checks every push for AWS account numbers, access keys, GitHub and RunPod tokens, private keys, and Google OAuth secrets.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.