---
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright (c) 2025-2026 NVIDIA CORPORATION & AFFILIATES. All rights reserved.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
title: "KV Block Manager"
---

The Dynamo KV Block Manager (KVBM) is a scalable runtime component
designed to handle memory allocation, management, and remote sharing of
Key-Value (KV) blocks for inference tasks across heterogeneous and
distributed environments. It acts as a unified memory layer for
frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, and TRT-LLM.

It offers:

- A **unified memory API** that spans GPU memory(in future) , pinned
  host memory, remote RDMA-accessible memory, local or distributed pool
  of SSDs and remote file/object/cloud storage systems.
- Support for evolving **block lifecycles** (allocate → register →
  match) with event-based state transitions that storage can subscribe
  to.
- Integration with **NIXL**, a dynamic memory exchange layer used for
  remote registration, sharing, and access of memory blocks over
  RDMA/NVLink.

The Dynamo KV Block Manager serves as a reference implementation that
emphasizes modularity and extensibility. Its pluggable design enables
developers to customize components and optimize for specific
performance, memory, and deployment needs.


