Release 22.05

This NVIDIA Optimized Deep Learning Framework, powered by Apache MXNet, container release is intended for use on the NVIDIA Ampere Architecture A100 GPU and on previous generation GPUs like V100 and T4, and with the latest NVIDIA CUDA® 11 and NVIDIA cuDNN 8 libraries. The container image is available on NGC.

Contents of the Optimized Deep Learning Framework container

This container image contains the complete source of the NVIDIA Optimized Deep Learning Framework, which is based upon Apache MXNet version 1.9.0.rc6. It is prebuilt and installed to the Python path. The container also includes the following:

• Ubuntu 20.04 including Python 3.8
• NVIDIA CUDA 11.7.0
• NVIDIA cuBLAS 11.10.1.25
• cuDNN 8.4.0.27
• NCCL 2.12.10 (optimized for NVIDIA NVLink®)
• Amazon Labs Sockeye sequence-to-sequence framework 2.3.14 (for machine translation)
• rdma-core 32.1
• OpenMPI 4.1.2rc4
• OpenUCX 1.12.0
• GDRCopy 2.3
• NVIDIA HPC-X 2.10
• Horovod 0.24.2, with enhancements
• NVIDIA TensorRT™ 8.2.5
• NVIDIA DALI® 1.13.0
• Nsight Compute 2022.1.1.2
• Nsight Systems 2022.1.3.3
• GluonCV Toolkit 0.7
• GluonNLP Toolkit 0.8.1
• Jupyter and JupyterLab:
  • Jupyter Client 6.0.0
  • Jupyter Core 4.6.1
  • Jupyter Notebook 6.0.3
  • JupyterLab 2.2.10
  • JupyterLab Server 1.0.6
  • Jupyter-TensorBoard

Driver Requirements

Release 22.05 is based on CUDA 11.7, which requires NVIDIA Driver release 515 or later. However, if you are running on a data center GPU (for example, T4 or any other data center GPU), you can use NVIDIA driver release 450.51 (or later R450), 470.57 (or later R470), or 510.47 (or later R510). The CUDA driver's compatibility package only supports particular drivers. Thus, users should upgrade from all R418, R440, and R460 drivers, which are not forward-compatible with CUDA 11.7. For a complete list of supported drivers, see the CUDA Application Compatibility topic. For more information, see CUDA Compatibility and Upgrades.

GPU Requirements

Release 22.05 supports CUDA compute capability 6.0 and later. This corresponds to GPUs in the NVIDIA Pascal, NVIDIA Volta™, NVIDIA Turing™, and NVIDIA Ampere Architecture GPU families. Specifically, for a list of GPUs that this compute capability corresponds to, see CUDA GPUs. For additional support details, see Deep Learning Frameworks Support Matrix.

Key Features and Enhancements

This Optimized Deep Learning Framework release includes the following key features and enhancements.

• NVIDIA Optimized Deep Learning Framework, powered by Apache MXNet container image version 22.05 is based on 1.9.0rc6.

  Apache MXNet is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Announcements

• Deep learning framework containers 19.11 and later include experimental support for Singularity v3.0.
• The TensorCore example models are no longer provided in the core container (previously shipped in /workspace/nvidia-examples).

  The models can instead be obtained from Github or the NGC. Some python packages, included in previous containers to support these example models, have also been removed. Depending on their specific use cases, you might need to add some packages that were previously preinstalled.

NVIDIA Optimized Deep Learning Framework Container Versions

The following table shows what versions of Ubuntu, CUDA, Apache MXNet, and TensorRT are supported in each of the NVIDIA containers for the Optimized Deep Learning Framework. For older container versions, refer to the Frameworks Support Matrix.

Tensor Core Examples

The tensor core examples in GitHub and NGC focus on achieving the best performance and convergence from Volta tensor cores by using the latest deep learning example networks and model scripts for training. Each example model trains with mixed precision Tensor Cores on Volta and NVIDIA Turing, so you can get results much faster than training without tensor cores. This model is tested against each NGC monthly container release to ensure consistent accuracy and performance over time. This container includes the following tensor core examples:

• The ResNet50 v1.5 model is a slightly modified version of the original ResNet50 v1 model that trains to a higher accuracy.

  This model script is available on GitHub and one NGC.

Automatic Mixed Precision

Training deep learning networks is a computationally intensive task. Novel model architectures tend to have an increasing number of layers and parameters, which slows down training. Fortunately, new generations of training hardware and software optimizations make training these new models a feasible task.

Most of the hardware and software training optimization opportunities involve exploiting lower precision, such as FP16, to use the Tensor Cores that are available on new Volta and Turing GPUs. While training in FP16 showed great success in image classification tasks, other more complicated neural networks typically stayed in FP32 due to difficulties in applying the FP16 training guidelines that are needed to ensure proper model training.

Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP) automatically applies the FP16 training guidelines by using FP16 precision where it provides the most benefit, while conservatively keeping in full FP32 precision operations unsafe to do in FP16.

In the container, the NVIDIA Optimized Deep Learning Framework, powered by Apache MXNet AMP tutorial is located in the /opt/mxnet/nvidia-examples/AMP/AMP_tutorial.md directory, shows you how to get started with mixed precision training using AMP for Apache MXNet, by using the SSD network example from GluonCV.

For more information about AMP, see the Training With Mixed Precision Guide.

Fixed Issues

The following issue was fixed in this release:

• Fixed an issue from release 22.03 where segmentation faults are seen at the beginning of model training on A100.

  Users no longer need to set MXNET_CUDNN_HEUR_MODE=0 in the environment as a workaround.