Optix 6.0.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4

Hi,

I have a question about deplying Optix 6.0 on a cluster. We have a cluster of Volta GPU nodes which currently runs RHEL 7.4.

The release notes for Optix 6.0 mention that driver version 418.30 or later as a requirement, which itself requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.10 or 7.6 as noted here: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/tesla-release-notes-418-4004/index.html

Does this mean that 418.30 can run on RHEL 7.4 as well?

Thanks in advance

Hey there,

After reading the data center release notes and asking around internally, I think the answer here is:

  • RHEL 7.4 is not officially supported according to the data center release notes, since RHEL6 and RHEL7 are two different release & support paths, and 7.4 predates the officially supported 7.6.

  • That doesn’t mean OptiX 6 won’t work on RHEL 7.4.

As I understand it, the main dependency the driver has on your OS is the toolchain, which might not have changed significantly between RHEL 7.4 and 7.6. I don’t know what changed, and I didn’t check, but for what it’s worth, the meaning of the version number (7.6) in the driver release notes is that it has been tested working with that version, and not that earlier versions either can’t or won’t work.

To test whether you can run OptiX 6 on RHEL 7.4, we suggest installing the 418 driver and OptiX 6 manually on one machine running RH 7.4. If the driver installs without any errors, and if an OptiX 6 sample runs without any run time symbol / link errors, then your configuration will very likely run without problems.

If you do run into errors during the driver install process or symbol errors when running an OptiX 6 sample, let us know and we can try to determine if there’s a manageable upgrade path to get you there.


David.

Thanks David, that’s helpful information. We will give it a try as you suggested.

Cheers.