GPU acceleration on Vagrant + Virtual box

[Shaunak De]

Hello,

I am trying to set up caffe on a Vagrant+Virtualbox set up.
An answer on stack overflow [1] indicates that GPU acceleration
is not possible on a virtual machine.

I just wanted to confirm if this was the case.

Secondly, I am also trying to set up a VM PLayer + Ubuntu instance
(with what I think is support for GPU). Is that also futile to set up?

Thanks.
Shaunak
shaunakde at gmail




[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/28979649/894903

[Dennis Mungai]

Hello Shaunak,

You may have more luck with KVM-GT (KVM with Graphics Virtualization
passthrough) or Xen-GT (Xen with Virtualization Passthrough).

See this for more information and to bring yourself up to speed:

1. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg1MzQ
2. https://github.com/01org/KVMGT-kernel
3. https://01.org/kvm/blogs/albcamus/2014/kvmgt-first-release
4. http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/f/f3/01x08b-KVMGT-a.pdf
5. http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/b/b3/01x09b-VFIOandYou-small.pdf


TL: DR > You'll need a motherboard, BIOS, chipset and processor that
supports VT-d with IOMMU (Intel) or an AMD equivalents' AMD I/O
Virtualization technology, a compatible virtualization layer (see
above), and PCIe devices that support the FLR+ (Function Level Reset
flag), confirmed via lspci -vv run as root on Linux.


There's an excellent discussion on the Arch forums about the same
here https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768&p=120 that may
also interest you.

This is a bit of an unchartered ground, so expect breakages and
hardware incompatibilities if one of these requirements is either not
met or your BIOS vendor breaks the feature with a shoddy BIOS
requiring workarounds (as is often the case). Your mileage may vary.

Good luck.

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[revspooner]

There is a caffe dockerfile that will allow you to run GPU accelerated caffe in a container.

DOCKER_NVIDIA_DEVICES="--device /dev/nvidia0:/dev/nvidia0 --device /dev/nvidiactl:/dev/nvidiactl --device /dev/nvidia-uvm:/dev/nvidia-uvm"
sudo docker run -ti $DOCKER_NVIDIA_DEVICES tleyden5iwx/caffe-gpu-master /bin/bash

Should you want to use this on an amazon GPU instance there is also an AMI with the drivers configured

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/caffe-users/CAKKYfmGOF8vYSeVfb%3DcoMm%3DvB5t9Y2Hxej1H7Z7co5-7dob5UA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Shaunak De]

Thank you for your responses. I do understand now that there are ways of doing this, and it is probably easier for me to write models in CPU only mode and then test / run them on another machine / AWS

--

Shaunak De

http://shaunak.ws/