Programming

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Can anybody explain why CUDA and Rocm are necessary and why OpenCL isn't the solution? (self.programming)

submitted 2 days ago by onlinepersona to c/programming

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've read multiple times that CUDA dominates, mostly because NVIDIA dominates. Rocm is the AMD equivalent, but OpenCL also exists. From my understanding, these are technologies used to program graphics cards - always thought that shaders were used for that.

There is a huge gap in my knowledge and understanding about this, so I'd appreciate somebody laying this out for me. I could ask an LLM and be misguided, but I'd rather not 🤣

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (6 children)

AFIK it’s only NVIDIA that allows containers shared access to a GPU on the host.

With the majority of code being deployed in containers, you end up locked into the NVIDIA ecosystem even if you use OpenCL. So I guess people just use CUDA since they are limited by the container requirement anyways.

That’s from my experience using OpenGL headless. If I’m wrong please correct me; I’d prefer being GPU agnostic.

[–] moonpiedumplings 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

AFIK it’s only NVIDIA that allows containers shared access to a GPU on the host.

This cannot be right. I'm pretty sure that it is possible to run OpenCL applications in containers that are sharing a GPU.

I should test this if I have time. My plan was to use a distrobox container since that shares the GPU by default and run something like lc0 to see if opencl acceleration works.

Now where is my remindme bot? (I won't have time).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

You really piqued my interest. I use docker/podman.

W/ an AMD graphics card, eglinfo on the host shows the card is AMD Radeon and driver is matching that.

In the container, without --gpus=all, it shows the card is unknown and the driver is "swrast" (so just CPU fallback).

To make --gpus=all work, it gives the error

docker: Error response from daemon: could not select device driver "" with capabilities: [[gpu]

I was doing a bad job searching before. I found that AMD can share the GPU, it just works a little differently in terms of how to launch the container. https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/install/amdgpu-install.html#amdgpu-install-dkms

But sadly my AMD GPU is too old/junk to have current driver support.

Anyways, appreciate the reply! Now I can mod my code to run on cheaper cloud instances.

(Note I'm an OpenGL/3D app developer, but probably OpenCL works about the same architecturally)

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