Learn how to deploy a GPU instance on Linux or Windows
GPU instances are technically similar to the instances from the 2017 range, but they also have a graphics card (Graphic Processing Unit or GPU). The technology used (pci_passthrough) allows the instance’s operating system to control the GPU in exactly the same way a physical machine would.
The GPUs offered are the NVIDIA Tesla V100.
Requirements
- a Public Cloud project with access to the regions where GPUs are available
Instructions
You will find the information needed to deploy a GPU instance on Linux or Windows below. Please keep in mind that you cannot change the Instance OS from Linux to Windows or vice-versa. Therefore, please be sure that you create the instance with the correct OS by default.
On Linux
All the images we offer can be used on a GPU instance.
Once you are logged in to the OVH Control Panel, in your Public Cloud project, click on Create an instance
and choose a GPU instance:
Then, select the Linux OS of your choice:
The instance will start a few seconds later. You can then log in and check for the graphics card:
lspci | grep -i nvidia 00:06.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GV100GL [Tesla V100S PCIe 32GB] (rev a1)
The graphics card is there, but cannot be used yet. To do so, you must first install the NVIDIA driver. You can find the list of packages at this address: List of available Linux packages.
You will then need to enter the following commands:
wget URL_of_packet_to_download sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-XXXX-XXXXXX sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install cuda sudo reboot
Once the instance has been rebooted, the graphics card will appear in the NVIDIA utility program:
nvidia-smi Wed Nov 29 20:44:51 2023
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 545.23.08 Driver Version: 545.23.08 CUDA Version: 12.3 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
| 0 Tesla V100S-PCIE-32GB On | 00000000:00:06.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 33C P0 25W / 250W | 0MiB / 32768MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=======================================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The GPU instance is now fully functional and usable.
On Windows
There are incompatibilities between the NVIDIA driver and the KVM/pci_passthrough virtualization solution. Windows standard images do not work. Due to that, we offer special images, based on a virtual UEFI BIOS, which allows the driver to function correctly (this is only the case for G1, G2, and G3 instances - range 2017 and before).
Once you are logged in to the OVH Control Panel, in your Public Cloud project, click on Create an instance
, and choose a GPU instance:
Then, select the Windows of your choice:
Once your GPU instance has started, you will need to install the NVIDIA driver from the official website.
Start an instance using one of the available GPU types (t1-45, t1-90, t1-180...). This should only take a few minutes.
Afterwards, all that’s left to do is to install the required driver, which will then be displayed here:
Going further
For more information and tutorials, please see our other Public Cloud support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.