System requirements for GPU support

This article describes hardware and operating system requirements to enable GPU support for UDFs.

The cluster nodes must meet the general system requirements for an on-premises installation of Exasol version 2025.2 or later. To enable GPU support, the following additional requirements must also be met:

Hardware requirements

  • Only NVIDIA Data Center GPUs are currently supported.

    For more information, see NVIDIA Data Center GPUs on the NVIDIA website.

  • The number and model of GPU devices must be identical on all nodes.

  • NVIDIA Multi-instance GPU (MIG) is not supported.

  • For security reasons, we recommend enabling GPU ECC memory mode.

    For more information, see Virtual GPU Software User Guide on the NVIDIA website.

For more details about hardware sizing, see Hardware sizing considerations for GPU support.

Operating system requirements

GPU acceleration is supported on the following Linux distributions:

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

For more information about the OS requirements for Exasol, see Operating system requirements.

NVIDIA GPU drivers

Only NVIDIA LTS branch drivers are supported. For security reasons, we recommend that you always keep the driver updated to the latest supported LTS driver version.

For more information about NVIDIA drivers, see NVIDIA Data Center Drivers on the NVIDIA website.

For information about the latest supported driver, see Exasol Script Lanugage Flavors Overview on GitHub.

NVIDIA Container Toolkit

Install the newest version of the NVIDIA Container Toolkit and pin the installation to this version.

Exasol normally supports the newest version of the toolkit, unless it is explicitly stated as unsupported in this documentation. For security and stability reasons we recommend that you regularly update to the newest version of the toolkit.

For more information, see Overview – NVIDIA Container Toolkit on the NVIDIA website.