[Improvotter]

> We also found time and time again that it was faster than opencl for what we were trying to do and the hardware available to us on cloud providers was Nvidia GPUs.

Were some benchmarks done perhaps or could you provide some more low-level reasons as to why CUDA was more performant? I'm not experienced with CUDA, just generally interested.

I also have to say that I am a bit skeptical of Nvidia as I have never received any proper support for Linux development on Nvidia GPUs for drivers and generally tracking bugs on their cards. It was so frustrating that I just switched to AMD GPUs that "just worked". How is this different for these kinds of use cases? Does Nvidia only care about their potential enterprise customers but they don't care about general usage of their GPUs on Linux? It seems to rub me the wrong way and I don't understand.

[felipe_aramburu]

Nvidia loves and cherishes you (I think I don't work there). They want you to be able to do this on your laptop, your server, your super computer.

If it has been a few years I would encourage you to get your feet wet again because support has gotten alot better. It's not like 5 years ago when it was nigh impossible to get the driver installed and weird conflicts would come up. I generally recommend using the debian installer if that works for you. Rapids is meant to make data science at scale accessible to people. If you have trouble with CUDA drop by the https://rapids-goai.slack.com . There are many people there that are willing to help.

[esistgut]

Do you use Nvidia products on Linux? Reading "love" and "Nvidia" in the same sentence feels a little bit odd because the general sentiment for Nvidia on the Linux community is "don't touch it with a 10 foot pole". If I remember correctly Torvalds himself named it the worst hardware company they had to deal with.

[shaklee3]

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Besides games, using CUDA on Linux has been the de facto OS for anything serious for almost as long as CUDA has existed. What exactly is the problem with it?

[orbifold]

I think this sentiment exists solely among people that don’t actually own any NVIDIA hardware. I‘ve never had any problems with their drivers, any crashes in video games can be usually be attributed to be at least in part the Games fault. In contrast to Windows Linux has abysmal support for restarting crashed video drivers.

[jstimpfle]

Well known video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

[dikei]

Linus Torvalds's kernel developer point of view might be very different from the majority of users'. For the end users, they just need to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers and everything just works.

For a long time, Nvidia was the best option for 3D graphics on Linux. ATI/AMD had terrible drivers (fglrx/Catalyst), Intel had abysmal performance.

[Xelbair]

>For the end users, they just need to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers and everything just works.

And that's the crux of the issue. proprietary drivers.

[pjmlp]

Hollywood and other 3D heavy creation studios are pretty fine with it.

[orbifold]

The proprietary drivers are pretty nice and performant and have been for a long time. The same can’t be said about Intel (they don’t produce comparable hardware) or AMD (until recently their drivers were garbage, at the moment their best graphics card is worse than the best NVIDIA one)

[lmeyerov]

We exclusively do Nvidia/Linux.

With nvidia-docker (multi-year effort at this point) and AMIs, esp. the era of ML, this is a non-issue for 80% of our users. The other 20% struggle even without the GPUs. ML is a thing and GPUs run it, so the community has come together here.

Linux laptops remain a mess in general tho, which is annoying for non-cloud dev =/