Installing CUDA (Ubuntu)

Introduction

This post is here in case anyone ever has to deal with setting up CUDA, which can easily become a massive pain. Following these steps, you should be able to set up a working environment with CUDA in only a few minutes. It has been tested only with Ubuntu 22.04.

Install NVIDIA drivers

Update & upgrade

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Remove previous NVIDIA installation

sudo apt autoremove nvidia* --purge

Check Ubuntu devices

ubuntu-drivers devices

You will install the NVIDIA driver whose version is tagged with recommended

Install Ubuntu drivers

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Install NVIDIA drivers

My recommended version is 525, adapt to yours

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-525

Reboot & Check

reboot

after restart verify that the following command works

nvidia-smi

Install CUDA drivers

Update & upgrade

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Install CUDA toolkit

sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

Check CUDA install

nvcc --version

Install cuDNN

Download cuDNN .deb file

You can download cuDNN file here. You will need an Nvidia account. Select the cuDNN version for the appropriate CUDA version, which is the version that appears when you run:

nvcc --version

Install cuDNN

sudo apt install ./<filename.deb>
sudo cp /var/cudnn-<something>.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/

My cuDNN version is 8, adapt the following to your version:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libcudnn8
sudo apt install libcudnn8-dev
sudo apt install libcudnn8-samples

Test CUDA on Pytorch

Create a virtualenv and activate it

sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo pip3 install virtualenv 
virtualenv -p py3.10 venv
source venv/bin/activate

Install pytorch

pip3 install torch torchvision torchaudio

Open Python and execute a test

import torch
print(torch.cuda.is_available()) # should be True

t = torch.rand(10, 10).cuda()
print(t.device) # should be CUDA

Docker integration

Install the nvidia-container-runtime for compatibility with Docker containers. Follow this installation guide, don't forget to do the configuration steps.