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GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

leblancfg.com

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#11

Yeah, not sure why you would be in Grub for Nvidia graphics drivers. This whole thing seems pretty odd to me since I've not seen a Nvidia driver problem in several years. Was he trying to use like Ubuntu 12.04 or something. Manjaro is a great choice and it does "just work" the best. All the others work just fine though.

I have had issues with centos 7.2 and nvidia drivers. Nvidia assume linux kernel sources are installed, but centos 7.2 puts them in a directory that the nvidia driver can't find. I ended up having to scp sources from a working machine and add symbolics links to get the drivers working (1080Ti card - i assume the Tesla drivers work better).

CentOS is based on a stack that is nearing 5 years old so that makes sense. The driver world (even mesa itself) has matured greatly since then. Mesa and Nvidia even have libraries now that help them coexist instead of replacing/overwriting library files.

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that I set up CUDA and Tensorflow in less than an hour. Admittedly, this is on Ubuntu (my colleagues don't like wild distro experiments), which may be easier. I compile every Tensorflow version (to compile with march=native). It is usually uneventful and takes a couple of minutes of my time. By the way, a Tesla card also costs > 5000 Euro and then add the cost of a machine with enough fast cores, memory, and d…

The author says they chose Manjaro because they couldn't get Ubuntu to work.

I've just installed it all from scratch on Ubuntu 16 in about 20 minutes. Just followed the instructions on TF website exactly. Didn't compile TF though, don't see the need.

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#13
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author says they chose Manjaro because they couldn't get Ubuntu to work.

I've just installed it all from scratch on Ubuntu 16 in about 20 minutes. Just followed the instructions on TF website exactly. Didn't compile TF though, don't see the need.

I know; see my other comments on the thread. I was responding directly to "Ubuntu may be easier" to indicate that the distro difference is not the cause of the authors problems. They've clearly got a messed up system or install procedure.

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#14
Archlinux user here (Manjaro is based on Archlinux). TensorFlow with GPU support is a supported package you can install it with all it's dependencies in a simple command with Pacman. But you don't want to do that the same way you don't want to compile TensorFlow. It is better to use an official docker image because they include all the dependencies, even the optionals as nccl 2.0. You forgot to install it, and it is speed up if you use more than one GPU. Just use the official docker image and forget all the burdensome of configuring everything.

P.S. well you need to install docker with Nvidia support, but you can use it in the future for other things. This is also a couple of packages in Pacman (maybe Nvidia docker is in air, I don't remember now).

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#16
Do you want to know pain? Try to use OpenCL with a GCN1 GPU (AMD 7970) with TF.

You can more or less do it with SYCL / ComputeCPP, which is great, but it is not trivial either. It does require you to compile TF and may fail to operate some operations.

Full disclosure I have not retried it recently, last time was 6 month aago, and a great amount of work is done on the SYCL / ComputeCPP front.

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#17
post #16

Do you want to know pain? Try to use OpenCL with a GCN1 GPU (AMD 7970) with TF. You can more or less do it with SYCL / ComputeCPP, which is great, but it is not trivial either. It does require you to compile TF and may fail to operate some operations. Full disclosure I have not retried it recently, last time was 6 month aago, and a great amount of work is done on the SYCL / ComputeCPP front.

… Which is somewhat sad, given AMD's open drivers are terrific and a pleasure to use on my machine, even for Steam games.

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#19
post #3

So basically, your calculations for deciding whether purchasing physical GPUs or using cloud GPUs is more cost effective should add $5,000 (50 hours at $100 an hour seems reasonable) onto the cost of any physical rig, and assume you have a spare 50 hours of opportunity cost to set it up. All the ML researchers lusting for bare metal need to decide if they want to be "Gentoo Ricers" - https://funroll-loops.teurasporsa…

50 hours is definitely an outlier. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to linux and drivers, and I managed to get an nvidia GPU working on ubuntu in about an hour or two of swearing and a dozen reboots.

Same -- 90 minutes. Not complicated enough to warrant paying for PaaS.

Re: GPU Headaches: Notes on Installing CUDA, CuDNN and Tensorflow on Manjaro

#20
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author says they chose Manjaro because they couldn't get Ubuntu to work.

I've just installed it all from scratch on Ubuntu 16 in about 20 minutes. Just followed the instructions on TF website exactly. Didn't compile TF though, don't see the need.

There's definitely a need its waaay faster with -march=native.

https://blog.perfinion.com/2018/07/tensorflow-cpu-supports-i...

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