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GPUs

Description

This page contains all information you need to submit GPU-jobs successfully on Ubelix.

Important Information on GPU Usage

Code that runs on the CPU will not magically make use of GPUs by simply submitting a job to the ‘gpu’ partition! You have to explicitly adapt your code to run on the GPU, e.g. an CUDA or OpenACC implementation. Also, code that runs on a GPU will not necessarily run faster than it runs on the CPU. For example, GPUs require a huge amount of highly parallelizable tasks. In other words, you must understand the characteristics of your job, and make sure that you only submit jobs to the ‘gpu’ partition that can actually benefit from GPUs.

When submitting to the GPU partition the GPU type specification is required.

GPU Type

Ubelix currently features four types of GPUs. You have to choose an architecture and use the following --gres option to select it.

Type SLURM gres option
Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti --gres=gpu:gtx1080ti:<number_of_gpus>
Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 Ti --gres=gpu:rtx2080ti:<number_of_gpus>
Nvidia Geforce RTX 3090 --gres=gpu:rtx3090:<number_of_gpus>
Nvidia Tesla P100 --gres=gpu:teslaP100:<number_of_gpus>

Job Submission

Use the following options to submit a job to the gpu partition using the default job QoS:

#SBATCH --partition=gpu
#SBATCH --gres=gpu:<type>:<number_of_gpus>

job_gpu_preempt

For investors we provides investor partitions with specific QoS for each investor, defining the purchased resources. In case of GPU we want/need to provide instant access to purchased GPU resources. Nevertheless, to efficiently use all resources, the job_gpu_preemt exists in the gpu partition. Jobs, submitted with this QoS, may interrupted if resources are required for investors. Short jobs, and jobs with checkpointing benefit from these additional resources.

For example requesting 4 RTX2080Ti 

#SBATCH --partition=gpu
#SBATCH --qos=job_gpu_preempt
#SBATCH --gres=gpu:rtx2080ti:4

Use the following option to ensure that the job, if preempted, won’t be requeued but canceled instead:

#SBATCH --no-requeue

Application adaptation

Applications do only ran on GPUs if they are build specifically for GPUs. There are multiple ways to implement algorithms for GPU usage. The most common ones are low level languages like CUDA or pragma oriented implementations like OpenACC.

CUDA

To build and run CUDA applications, its compiler and libraries are provided managed via modules. Run module avail to see which versions are available, for example:

module avail CUDA
---- /software.el7/modulefiles/all ----
   CUDA/8.0.61                           cuDNN/7.1.4-CUDA-9.2.88
   CUDA/9.0.176                          cuDNN/7.6.0.64-gcccuda-2019a (D)
   CUDA/9.1.85                           fosscuda/2019a
   CUDA/9.2.88                           fosscuda/2019b               (D)
   CUDA/10.1.105-GCC-8.2.0-2.31.1        gcccuda/2019a
   CUDA/10.1.243                  (D)    gcccuda/2019b                (D)
   cuDNN/6.0-CUDA-8.0.61                 OpenMPI/3.1.3-gcccuda-2019a
   cuDNN/7.0.5-CUDA-9.0.176              OpenMPI/3.1.4-gcccuda-2019b
   cuDNN/7.0.5-CUDA-9.1.85

Run module load <module> to load a specific version of CUDA:

module load cuDNN/7.1.4-CUDA-9.2.88

If you need cuDNN you must load the cuDNN module. The appropriate CUDA version is then loaded automatically as a dependency.

Further Information

CUDA: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone
CUDA C/C++ Basics: http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/116711/sc11-cuda-c-basics.pdf
Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/10series/geforce-gtx-1080-ti
Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 Ti: https://www.nvidia.com/de-de/geforce/graphics-cards/rtx-2080-ti/ Nvidia Geforce RTX 3090: https://www.nvidia.com/de-de/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3090/ Nvidia Tesla P100: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-p100.html