Install GPU drivers and software

This section explains how to install drivers and additional software to enable GPU support.

To enable GPU support for UDFs on Exasol hosts you must install the latest supported NVIDIA GPU driver and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit on each host. In this section you will learn how to do this on hosts running on the currently supported versions of Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

We recommend that you always use the Linux distribution package manager to install the NVIDIA GPU drivers.

Prerequisites

  • The host systems and the installed GPU devices must meet the system requirements for GPU support.

    For more information, see System requirements for GPU support.

  • Each host system must be updated with the latest OS kernel and packages, and must then be restarted before you install the GPU driver.

  • You must be root or have sudo privileges on the hosts.

Installation

NVIDIA persistence service setup

For applications to interact with an NVIDIA GPU, the NVIDIA kernel driver must be loaded, running, and connected to the application. If no application is using the GPU, the kernel driver may not be loaded and running. This can result in application startup delays and loss of persistent configurations/data in the driver.

NVIDIA provides a user-space daemon on Linux to support persistence of driver state across different CUDA compute applications. The daemon runs as a system service which mimics an external client of the GPU but does not actually use the GPU. We strongly recommend that you use the NVIDIA persistence daemon to ensure persistence of driver state on your hosts.

The following article explains how to install the NVIDIA persistence daemon as a permanently running system service.

Set up the NVIDIA persistence daemon

The NVIDIA persistence service setup is identical for all supported Linux distributions.

Validation

To validate the installation you can use standard NVIDIA command-line utilities. To learn more, see Validate GPU setup.