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

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 1 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.

[–] [email protected] 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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