Using cloud vGPUs

This article is a draft

This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.

This guide describes how to allocate vGPU resources to a virtual machine (VM), installing the necessary drivers and checking whether the vGPU can be used.

Supported flavors

To use a GPU within a VM, the instance needs to be deployed on one of the flavors listed below. The GPU will be available to the operating system via the PCI bus.

• vgpu1-c18-56gb

Preparation of a VM running CentOS7

Once the VM is available, make sure to update the OS to the latest available software, including the kernel and reboot the VM to have the latest kernel running.

[root@test centos]# yum -y update && reboot

Since the proprietary nvidia drivers need to be compiled against the running kernel, the package dkms is required from the EPEL Repository

[root@test centos]# yum -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Install the Arbutus Cloud repository definition, it also installs the public key the package are signed with to ensure their authenticity, since these drivers and userspace tools are carefully tested first against the infrastructure, before they are made available.

[root@test centos]# yum -y install http://repo.arbutus.cloud.computecanada.ca/pulp/repos/centos/7/x86_64/Packages/a/arbutus-cloud-vgpu-repo-1.0-1.el7.noarch.rpm

The last step is to install the nvidia vGPU packages. The kernel module package 'nvidia-vgpu-kmod', will take a few minutes as it compiles the required kernel modules in the background.

yum -y install nvidia-vgpu-kmod nvidia-vgpu-gridd nvidia-vgpu-tools

After the successful installation, the vGPU is a now accessible and licensed.\