Install NVIDIA GPU drivers on N-series VMs running Windows

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Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets

To take advantage of the GPU capabilities of Azure N-series VMs backed by NVIDIA GPUs, you must install NVIDIA GPU drivers.

If you choose to install NVIDIA GPU drivers manually, this article provides supported operating systems, drivers, and installation and verification steps. Manual driver setup information is also available for Linux VMs.

For basic specs, storage capacities, and disk details, see GPU Windows VM sizes.

Supported operating systems and drivers

NVIDIA Tesla (CUDA) drivers

NVIDIA Tesla (CUDA) drivers for NCv3-series, NCasT4_v3 VMs are tested on the operating systems listed in the following table. CUDA driver is generic and not Azure specific. For the latest drivers, visit the NVIDIA website.

Tip

As an alternative to manual CUDA driver installation on a Windows Server VM, you can deploy an Azure Data Science Virtual Machine image. The DSVM editions for Windows Server 2016 pre-install NVIDIA CUDA drivers, the CUDA Deep Neural Network Library, and other tools.

OS Driver
Windows Server 2019 451.82 (.exe)
Windows Server 2016 451.82 (.exe)

Driver installation

  1. Connect by Remote Desktop to each N-series VM.

  2. Download, extract, and install the supported driver for your Windows operating system.

After CUDA driver installation, a restart is not required.

Verify driver installation

If you have installed CUDA drivers then the Nvidia control panel will not be visible.

You can verify driver installation in Device Manager. The following example shows successful configuration of the Tesla K80 card on an Azure NC VM.

GPU driver properties

To query the GPU device state, run the nvidia-smi command-line utility installed with the driver.

  1. Open a command prompt and change to the C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI directory.

  2. Run nvidia-smi. If the driver is installed, you will see output similar to the following. The GPU-Util shows 0% unless you are currently running a GPU workload on the VM. Your driver version and GPU details may be different from the ones shown.

NVIDIA device status

RDMA network connectivity

RDMA network connectivity can be enabled on RDMA-capable N-series VMs such as NC24r deployed in the same availability set or in a single placement group in a virtual machine scale set. The HpcVmDrivers extension must be added to install Windows network device drivers that enable RDMA connectivity. To add the VM extension to an RDMA-enabled N-series VM, use Azure PowerShell cmdlets for Azure Resource Manager.

To install the latest version 1.1 HpcVMDrivers extension on an existing RDMA-capable VM named myVM in the China North 2 region:

Set-AzVMExtension -ResourceGroupName "myResourceGroup" -Location "chinanorth2" -VMName "myVM" -ExtensionName "HpcVmDrivers" -Publisher "Microsoft.HpcCompute" -Type "HpcVmDrivers" -TypeHandlerVersion "1.1"

For more information, see Virtual machine extensions and features for Windows.

The RDMA network supports Message Passing Interface (MPI) traffic for applications running with Microsoft MPI or Intel MPI 5.x.

Next steps

  • Developers building GPU-accelerated applications for the NVIDIA Tesla GPUs can also download and install the latest CUDA Toolkit. For more information, see the CUDA Installation Guide.