Interconnect between GPU nodes

Is there an equivalent --gres / <other_flag> command that can be used to request 1 GPU per 1 task for a setup requiring > 8 GPUs? I tried the following but it only requested 1 GPU for all the tasks:

#!/bin/bash -l

#SBATCH --job-name=SOTAVAE
#SBATCH --ntasks=9
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --gres=gpu:1
#SBATCH --partition=shared-gpu-EL7
#SBATCH --time=12:00:00
#SBATCH --mem=16000
#SBATCH --constraint="COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_6_0|COMPUTE_CAPABILITY_6_1"

srun --ntasks=9 --exclusive --multi-prog distributed.conf

I also tried setting #SBATCH --gres=gpu:9 but as expected this threw a Node does not exist error.