Accelerating workloads with NVIDIA GPUs with Red Hat Device Edge#

Introduction#

Note

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Red Hat has released Red Hat Device Edge, which provides access to MicroShift. MicroShift offers the simplicity of single-node deployment with the functionality and services you need for computing in resource-constrained locations. You can have many deployments on different hosts, creating the specific system image needed for each of your applications. Installing MicroShift on top of your managed RHEL devices in hard-to-service locations also allows for streamlined over-the-air updates.

Red Hat Device Edge combines light-weight Kubernetes using MicroShift with Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the edge. MicroShift is a Kubernetes implementation derived from OpenShift, focusing on a minimal footprint. Red Hat Device Edge addresses the needs of bare metal, virtual, containerized, or kubernetes workloads deployed to resource constrained environments.

Perform the procedures on this page to enable workloads to use NVIDIA GPUs on an x86 system running Red Hat Device Edge.

Prerequisites#

Install MicroShift from an RPM package on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 machine.

Verify an NVIDIA GPU is installed on the machine:

$ lspci -nnv | grep -i nvidia

Example Output

17:00.0 3D controller [0302]: NVIDIA Corporation GA100GL [A30 PCIe] [10de:20b7] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:1532]

Installing the NVIDIA GPU driver#

NVIDIA provides a precompiled driver in RPM repositories that implement the modularity mechanism. For more information, see Streamlining NVIDIA Driver Deployment on RHEL 8 with Modularity Streams.

At this stage, you should have already subscribed your machine and enabled the rhel-9-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms and rhel-9-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms repositories. Add the NVIDIA CUDA repository:
```
$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/rhel9/x86_64/cuda-rhel9.repo
```
NVIDIA provides different branches of their drivers, with different lifecycles, that are described in NVIDIA Datacenter Drivers documentation. Use the latest version from the production branch, for example, version R525. Install the driver, fabric-manager and NSCQ:
```
$ sudo dnf module install nvidia-driver:525
$ sudo dnf install nvidia-fabric-manager libnvidia-nscq-525
```
After installing the driver, disable the nouveau driver because it conflict with the NVIDIA driver:
```
$ echo 'blacklist nouveau' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-blacklist.conf
```
Update initramfs:
```
$ sudo dracut --force
```

Enable the nvidia-fabricmanager and nvidia-persistenced services:

$ sudo systemctl enable nvidia-fabricmanager.service
$ sudo systemctl enable nvidia-persistenced.service

Reboot the machine:
```
$ sudo systemctl reboot
```

After the machine boots, verify that the NVIDIA drivers are installed properly:

$ nvidia-smi

Example Output

Thu Jun 22 14:29:53 2023
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 525.105.17   Driver Version: 525.105.17   CUDA Version: 12.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA A30          Off  | 00000000:17:00.0 Off |                    0 |
| N/A   29C    P0    35W / 165W |      0MiB / 24576MiB |     25%      Default |
|                               |                      |             Disabled |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Installing the NVIDIA Container Toolkit#

The NVIDIA Container Toolkit enables users to build and run GPU accelerated containers. The toolkit includes a container runtime library and utilities to automatically configure containers to leverage NVIDIA GPUs. You have to install it to enable the container runtime to transparently configure the NVIDIA GPUs for the pods deployed in MicroShift.

The NVIDIA container toolkit supports the distributions listed in the NVIDIA Container Toolkit repository.

Add the libnvidia-container repository:

$ curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/rhel8.7/libnvidia-container.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/libnvidia-container.repo

Install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit for RHEL:

$ sudo dnf install nvidia-container-toolkit -y

The NVIDIA Container Toolkit requires some SELinux permissions to work properly. These permissions are set in three steps.

Use DNF to install the container-selinux.noarch package:
```
$ sudo dnf install container-selinux.noarch
```
Set the SELinux configuration flag for container_use_devices to on:
```
$ sudo setsebool -P container_use_devices on
```

It is still missing a permission, so create a policy file:

$ cat <<EOF > nvidia-container-microshift.te
module nvidia-container-microshift 1.0;

require {
              type xserver_misc_device_t;
              type container_t;
              class chr_file { map read write };
}

#============= container_t ==============
allow container_t xserver_misc_device_t:chr_file map;
EOF

Compile the policy:

$ checkmodule -m -M -o nvidia-container-microshift.mod nvidia-container-microshift.te

Create the semodule package:

$ semodule_package --outfile nvidia-container-microshift.pp --module nvidia-container-microshift.mod

Apply the policy:

$ sudo semodule -i nvidia-container-microshift.pp

Installing the NVIDIA Device Plugin#

To enable MicroShift to allocate GPU resource to the pods, deploy the NVIDIA Device Plugin. The plugin runs as a daemon set that provides the following features:

Exposes the number of GPUs on each node of your cluster.
Keeps track of the health of your GPUs.
Runs GPU-enabled containers in your Kubernetes cluster.

The deployment consists of adding manifests and a kustomize configuration to the /etc/microshift/manifests folder where MicroShift checks for manifests to create at start time. This is explained in the Configuring section of the MicroShift documentation.

Create the manifests folder:

$ sudo mkdir -p /etc/microshift/manifests

The device plugin runs in privileged mode, so you need to isolate it from other workloads by running it in its own namespace, nvidia-device-plugin. To add the plugin to the manifests deployed by MicroShift at start time, download the configuration file and save it at /etc/microshift/manifests/nvidia-device-plugin.yml.
```
$ curl -s -L https://gitlab.com/nvidia/kubernetes/device-plugin/-/raw/main/deployments/static/nvidia-device-plugin-privileged-with-service-account.yml | sudo tee /etc/microshift/manifests/nvidia-device-plugin.yml
```
The resources are not created automatically even though the files exist. You need to add them to the kustomize configuration. Do this by adding a single kustomization.yaml file in the manifests folder that references all the resources you want to create.
```
$ cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/microshift/manifests/kustomization.yaml
---
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
resources:
  - nvidia-device-plugin.yml
EOF
```
Restart the MicroShift service so that it creates the resources:
```
$ sudo systemctl restart microshift
```

After MicroShift restarts, verify that the pod is running in the nvidia-device-plugin namespace:

$ oc get pod -n nvidia-device-plugin

Example Output

NAMESPACE                  NAME                                   READY   STATUS        RESTARTS     AGE
nvidia-device-plugin       nvidia-device-plugin-daemonset-jx8s8   1/1     Running       0            1m

Verify in the log that it has registered itself as a device plugin for the nvidia.com/gpu resources:

$ oc logs -n nvidia-device-plugin nvidia-device-plugin-jx8s8

Example Output

[...]
2023/06/22 14:25:38 Retreiving plugins.
2023/06/22 14:25:38 Detected NVML platform: found NVML library
2023/06/22 14:25:38 Detected non-Tegra platform: /sys/devices/soc0/family file not found
2023/06/22 14:25:38 Starting GRPC server for 'nvidia.com/gpu'
2023/06/22 14:25:38 Starting to serve 'nvidia.com/gpu' on /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/nvidia-gpu.sock
2023/06/22 14:25:38 Registered device plugin for 'nvidia.com/gpu' with Kubelet

You can also verify that the node exposes the nvidia.com/gpu resources in its capacity:

$ oc get node -o json | jq -r '.items[0].status.capacity'

Example Output

{
  "cpu": "48",
  "ephemeral-storage": "142063152Ki",
  "hugepages-1Gi": "0",
  "hugepages-2Mi": "0",
  "memory": "196686216Ki",
  "nvidia.com/gpu": "1",
  "pods": "250"
}

Running a GPU-Accelerated Workload on Red Hat Device Edge#

You can run a test workload to verify that the configuration is correct. A simple workload is the CUDA vectorAdd program that NVIDIA provides in a container image.

Create a test namespace:
```
$ oc create namespace test
```

Create a file, such as pod-cuda-vector-add.yaml, with a pod specification. Note the spec.containers[0].resources.limits field where the nvidia.com/gpu resource specifies a value of 1.

$ cat << EOF > pod-cuda-vector-add.yaml
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-cuda-vector-add
  namespace: test
spec:
  restartPolicy: OnFailure
  containers:
  - name: cuda-vector-add
    image: "nvcr.io/nvidia/k8s/cuda-sample:vectoradd-cuda11.7.1-ubi8"
    resources:
      limits:
        nvidia.com/gpu: 1
    securityContext:
      allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
      capabilities:
        drop: ["ALL"]
      runAsNonRoot: true
      seccompProfile:
        type: "RuntimeDefault"
EOF

Create the pod:
```
$ oc apply -f pod-cuda-vector-add.yaml
```

Verify the pod log has found a CUDA device:

$ oc logs -n test test-cuda-vector-add

Example Output

[Vector addition of 50000 elements]
Copy input data from the host memory to the CUDA device
CUDA kernel launch with 196 blocks of 256 threads
Copy output data from the CUDA device to the host memory
Test PASSED
Done

Undeploy the pods in the pod-cuda-vector-add.yaml file:
```
$ oc delete -f pod-cuda-vector-add.yaml
```
Delete the test namespace:
```
$ oc delete ns test
```