CoreWeave ARENA: A Practical Approach to Workload Evaluation

Corey Sanders

Benchmarks can be useful, but they don’t capture how workloads behave under real operating conditions. A result can be accurate and still miss what actually matters: how your workload performs on GPUs in a real environment, with orchestration, storage, and networking in the loop.

That gap shows up in painfully familiar ways. You run a small test and it looks stable, then scale to your full pipeline and throughput drops 30%. Or a benchmark shows a model hitting your latency target, but when you run the workload end to end in a real environment, you start seeing timeouts. Teams end up running variations, debating what changed, trying to make a call from a partial signal. We built CoreWeave ARENA to turn evaluations into a repeatable process, and guesses into verifiable evidence. Something you can run, iterate on, and use to make decisions that you can defend before you invest in your infrastructure.

CoreWeave ARENA: Real workloads, real infrastructure, real results

CoreWeave ARENA is a production ready AI lab where teams run their actual workload on CoreWeave, under conditions that closely mirror how they plan to operate in production. The lab gives you a clear view of behavior that matters once this stops being a test—how it performs, how the system scales, and what it costs when the workload is steady, not occasional. Throughout the evaluation, our team of dedicated CoreWeave experts are there every step along the way to help you interpret results, iterate quickly, and help maintain focus on the decisions that matter.

While some of the initial testing and experimenting can be quick, for the real workload assessment, CoreWeave ARENA evaluations run for a few weeks. The window is intentional. It gives teams time to get past the first clean run, iterate on what they learn, and see what “normal” looks like instead of judging everything on a single best-case attempt.

A fast path from setup to signals you can actually trust

We keep the experience simple. Our experts start by setting up a notebook-based environment so you can get to a first real run quickly. In practice, we use a marimo-based notebook setup packaged for the lab, with guided notebooks and a baseline structure so teams aren’t spending the first days on setup and glue code.

From there, teams working with CoreWeave experts typically move in two steps. First we work with your team to validate the fundamentals so the environment is behaving as expected and the signals are trustworthy. Then we move into workload-shaped tests that reflect how you actually plan to operate, which is where the real value of the evaluation kicks in.

CoreWeave ARENA is designed to give you deep insights into practical questions about performance, cost, and workload behavior. Evaluations often include:

Measuring the impact of platform building blocks on real runs, such as data ingest and sustained throughput using AI Object Storage and LOTA
Understanding how a workload behaves under deeper stress beyond pass/fail benchmarks—where bottlenecks emerge, communication patterns shift, and performance changes between runs
Iterating on configuration and scale to see how results change as you adjust orchestration, data paths, or workload shape in ways that matter for downstream deployment

Operational visibility from first run to production

For experiment tracking, we preload the CoreWeave ARENA environment with a Weights & Biases trial so you can log metrics and artifacts from day one. If you already use Weights & Biases, you can keep your normal workflow. If you don’t, the evaluation is a straightforward place to try it without a long setup cycle.

Runs are also visible in CoreWeave Mission Control, the operating standard for running AI workloads. This is the same operating view you’ll rely on beyond the lab, with logs and metrics available in Grafana rather than a lab-only interface. It helps connect results to what’s happening underneath and makes it easier to understand why performance changes as you iterate.

The CoreWeave Mission Control Agent brings that operational signal into the tools teams already use, like Slack. It can surface key metrics, highlight what changed between runs, and keep the team focused on what’s worth paying attention to while you’re moving quickly.

For orchestration, CoreWeave ARENA supports the path that fits the workload including Kubernetes-native workflows on CKS (CoreWeave Kubernetes Service) or Slurm-based workflows via SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes) running on CKS.

Make the right call with real data, not educated guesses

CoreWeave ARENA is meant for teams who already have a real workload and are close to a decision, such as scaling it, changing infrastructure, or getting it ready for production.

We find that what teams want out of CoreWeave ARENA is the confidence they can build on and make a decision that will be key to the future of their workload. They aren’t interested in just validating that the workload runs, but they want to know if it behaves the way they need it to behave when it’s in real operation, with performance, scaling, and cost all in view. This allows you to focus on innovating new AI capabilities, new AI products, and new ways of working with AI, and it’s hard to move fast if you’re still guessing about the basics.

That’s the advantage of doing this before you’ve locked yourself into a rollout plan or committed to an AI provider. You can learn what’s true, adjust while there’s still room, and then make the decision with confidence.

Validate today. Decide with confidence. Scale what’s next.

Today, CoreWeave ARENA is available to existing customers to validate new workloads they have or validate existing workloads against new infrastructure. We plan to open applications for new teams in Q2 2026.

If you’re about to make a real infrastructure decision, don’t just do it on faith. Run the workload the way you plan to run it, analyze how it behaves, gain full visibility into what it costs, and make the call with confidence.
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Explore a quick demo of CoreWeave ARENA

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Join the CoreWeave ARENA briefing on proving AI production readiness

In this upcoming briefing, CoreWeave experts will walk through how evaluations work in practice and which signals matter most when building for future scale.