AI Setup Guide.md

AI Setup

NVIDIA CUDA on Linux

The instructions below are for Debian. I run LMDE3 with Cinnamon, and I found using the latest CUDA and NVIDIA drivers broke Cinnamon, causing it to run in fall-back mode. This is still not working - the roll-back steps are given below.

1. Check that you've got an NVIDIA device lspci | grep -i nvidia
2. Verify your device supports CUDA
3. Ensure your drivers are loaded - if not run sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver nvidia-smi
4. Determine your driver version using nvidia-smi (in my case 390.87)
5. Find which version of CUDA is supported by your driver from stack-overflow or official link (in my case it is CUDA 9.1) - table duplicated below
6. Go to https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive
   1. Choose your CUDA version
   2. Choose Linux
   3. Choose x86_64
   4. Choose Ubuntu
   5. Choose 17.04
   6. Choose runfile
   7. Download the base installer
7. Login as root sudo su -
8. Create/edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf to include

blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0

1. Run the installer sh /home/user/Downloads/cuda_9.1.85_387.26_linux.run
   1. Install everything except the driver and the samples
   2. Exit root user
2. Install the samples for you normal user: /usr/local/cuda/bin/cuda-install-samples-9.1.sh ~/dev/
3. Compile the samples:
   1. cd ~/dev/NVIDIA_CUDA-9.1_Samples
   2. make
4. Run a sample

./0_Simple/matrixMul/matrixMul                   
[Matrix Multiply Using CUDA] - Starting...
GPU Device 0: "GeForce GTX 950M" with compute capability 5.0

MatrixA(320,320), MatrixB(640,320)
Computing result using CUDA Kernel...
done
Performance= 179.84 GFlop/s, Time= 0.729 msec, Size= 131072000 Ops, WorkgroupSize= 1024 threads/block
Checking computed result for correctness: Result = PASS

NOTE: The CUDA Samples are not meant for performance measurements. Results may vary when GPU Boost is enabled.

CUDA 10.0: 410.48
CUDA    9.2: 396.xx
CUDA    9.1: 390.xx (update)
CUDA    9.0: 384.xx
CUDA    8.0    375.xx (GA2)
CUDA    8.0: 367.4x
CUDA    7.5: 352.xx
CUDA    7.0: 346.xx
CUDA    6.5: 340.xx
CUDA    6.0: 331.xx
CUDA    5.5: 319.xx
CUDA    5.0: 304.xx
CUDA    4.2: 295.41
CUDA    4.1: 285.05.33
CUDA    4.0: 270.41.19
CUDA    3.2: 260.19.26
CUDA    3.1: 256.40
CUDA    3.0: 195.36.15

Roll-back

1. Remove nvidia drivers sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
2. Comment out entires in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
3. Regenerate an initramfs image sudo update-initramfs -u