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Deploying a GPU instance

Stephanie R.
Updated

Learn how to deploy a GPU instance on Linux or Windows

GPU instances are technically similar to CPU instances 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 like a physical machine would.

The GPUs offered are the NVIDIA Tesla V100 and NVIDIA L4.

 

Requirements

 

Instructions

You will find the information needed to deploy a GPU instance on Linux or Windows below.

 

On Linux

All the images we offer can be used on a GPU instance.

If you don’t feel comfortable with manually compiling a kernel module, we recommend using a distribution that is officially supported by NVIDIA and for which they provide turnkey drivers: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads.

Once you are logged in to the OVHcloud Control Panel, in your Public Cloud project, click on Create an instance, choose the GPU instance tab, select a model, and click Next.

PCI_compute_deployGPUinstance01*.png

Next, follow the remaining steps in this guide. The process may take a few minutes.

The instance will start a few seconds later. You can then log in and check for the graphics card:

lspci | grep -i nvidia
00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1c03 (rev a1)
00:06.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 10f1 (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:

NOTE: The Linux command can vary based on your distribution. If in doubt, please check the official guide for your version of Linux.

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 apt-get install -y cuda-drivers
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo reboot

Once the instance has been rebooted, the graphics card will appear in the NVIDIA utility program:

nvidia-smi
Wed Apr 26 13:05:25 2017
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 375.51                 Driver Version: 375.51                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 106...  Off  | 0000:00:05.0     Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   22C    P0    26W / 120W |      0MiB /  6072MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID  Type  Process name                               Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The GPU instance is now fully functional and usable.

 

Go further

For more information and tutorials, please see our other Public Cloud support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.

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