StyleGAN TensorFlow dev with software-emulated CUDA?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Setup and Installation
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I’m fascinated by the recent popular StyleGAN AI-face generation technology ( GitHub - NVlabs/stylegan: StyleGAN - Official TensorFlow Implementation ). I have a Threadripper 1950x (3.9 ghz, 16 core, 32 thread) box, but no CUDA hardware at present, and for reasons not pertinent to the discussion it’s not a practical option for some time.

While hardware is clearly the ideal solution, for at least initial dev/testing purposes emulation is fine in my case, and that’s flexibility I’d like to have anyways. A perfomance hit of 10-100x is acceptable, somewhat mitigated by this high-end CPU.

I suspect the solution is configuring my Win10 environment and CUDA toolkit such that it finds an emulated GPU:

InvalidArgumentError (see above for traceback): Cannot assign a device for operation Gs/_Run/Gs/latents_in: node Gs/_Run/Gs/latents_in (defined at C:\dev\StyleGAN\dnnlib\tflib\network.py:218) was explicitly assigned to /device:GPU:0 but available devices are [ /job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:CPU:0 ]. Make sure the device specification refers to a valid device. The requested device appears to be a GPU, but CUDA is not enabled.
[[node Gs/_Run/Gs/latents_in (defined at C:\dev\StyleGAN\dnnlib\tflib\network.py:218) ]]

The answer may be staring me in the face, but I felt this was likely to be a common question due to what appears to be emerging popularity of StyleGAN.

Best,

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There is no such animal as an emulated GPU for purposes such as the relatively complex software stacks you want to run (tensorflow-gpu linked to CUDA libraries).

The styleGAN code you linked to expects tensorflow-gpu and an actual GPU among other things. If you wanted to run this code without a GPU, the starting point would be to use the tensorflow (not tensorflow-gpu) that doesn’t depend on a GPU. But there would almost certainly be modifications that would have to be made to the project code (e.g. the python code) to get that to work. I don’t have a recipe for that.

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Perfect. That answers that question, thank you.

I was unable to find a styleGAN specific forum to post this in, and styleGAN is an Nvidia project, is anyone aware of such a forum? It’s probably a question for that team.

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I’m playing with this code too and there are (non-academic) questions I have. Where is the best place to discuss?