GPU-enabled compute

  • Article

Note

Some GPU-enabled instance types are in Beta and are marked as such in the drop-down list when you select the driver and worker types during compute creation.

Overview

Azure Databricks supports compute accelerated with graphics processing units (GPUs). This article describes how to create compute with GPU-enabled instances and describes the GPU drivers and libraries installed on those instances.

To learn more about deep learning on GPU-enabled compute, see Deep learning.

Create a GPU compute

Creating a GPU compute is similar to creating any compute. You should keep in mind the following:

  • The Databricks Runtime Version must be a GPU-enabled version, such as Runtime 13.3 LTS ML (GPU, Scala 2.12.15, Spark 3.4.1).
  • The Worker Type and Driver Type must be GPU instance types.

Supported instance types

Azure Databricks supports the following instance types:

  • NC instance type series: Standard_NC12, Standard_NC24
  • NC v3 instance type series: Standard_NC6s_v3, Standard_NC12s_v3, Standard_NC24s_v3
  • NC T4 v3 instance type series: Standard_NC4as_T4_v3, Standard_NC8as_T4_v3, Standard_NC16as_T4_v3, Standard_NC64as_T4_v3
  • NC A100 v4 instance type series: Standard_NC24ads_A100_v4, Standard_NC48ads_A100_v4, Standard_NC96ads_A100_v4
  • ND A100 v4 instance type series: Standard_ND96asr_v4
  • NV A10 v5 instance type series: Standard_NV36ads_A10_v5, Standard_NV36adms_A10_v5, Standard_NV72ads_A10_v5
    • Standard_NV72ads_A10_v5 is not compatible with PyTorch 2.0+, and raises a CUDA error when running multi-GPU workloads. Because Databricks Runtime ML 14.0 and above pre-installs PyTorch 2.0+, we suggest using Databricks Runtime ML 13.x or manually running pip install torch==1.13.1 if you’re running PyTorch on multi-GPU workloads.

See Azure Databricks Pricing for an up-to-date list of supported GPU instance types and their availability regions. Your Azure Databricks deployment must reside in a supported region to launch GPU-enabled compute.

GPU scheduling

Databricks Runtime supports GPU-aware scheduling from Apache Spark 3.0. Azure Databricks preconfigures it on GPU compute.

GPU scheduling is not enabled on single-node compute.

spark.task.resource.gpu.amount is the only Spark config related to GPU-aware scheduling that you might need to change. The default configuration uses one GPU per task, which is ideal for distributed inference workloads and distributed training, if you use all GPU nodes. To do distributed training on a subset of nodes, which helps reduce communication overhead during distributed training, Databricks recommends setting spark.task.resource.gpu.amount to the number of GPUs per worker node in the compute Spark configuration.

For PySpark tasks, Azure Databricks automatically remaps assigned GPU(s) to indices 0, 1, …. Under the default configuration that uses one GPU per task, your code can simply use the default GPU without checking which GPU is assigned to the task. If you set multiple GPUs per task, for example 4, your code can assume that the indices of the assigned GPUs are always 0, 1, 2, and 3. If you do need the physical indices of the assigned GPUs, you can get them from the CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES environment variable.

If you use Scala, you can get the indices of the GPUs assigned to the task from TaskContext.resources().get("gpu").

For Databricks Runtime releases below 7.0, to avoid conflicts among multiple Spark tasks trying to use the same GPU, Azure Databricks automatically configures GPU compute so that there is at most one running task per node. That way the task can use all GPUs on the node without running into conflicts with other tasks.

NVIDIA GPU driver, CUDA, and cuDNN

Azure Databricks installs the NVIDIA driver and libraries required to use GPUs on Spark driver and worker instances:

  • CUDA Toolkit, installed under /usr/local/cuda.
  • cuDNN: NVIDIA CUDA Deep Neural Network Library.
  • NCCL: NVIDIA Collective Communications Library.

The version of the NVIDIA driver included is 535.54.03, which supports CUDA 11.0. For the NV A10 v5 instance type series, the version of the NVIDIA driver included is 525.105.17.

For the versions of the libraries included, see the release notes for the specific Databricks Runtime version you are using.

Note

This software contains source code provided by NVIDIA Corporation. Specifically, to support GPUs, Azure Databricks includes code from CUDA Samples.

NVIDIA End User License Agreement (EULA)

When you select a GPU-enabled “Databricks Runtime Version” in Azure Databricks, you implicitly agree to the terms and conditions outlined in the NVIDIA EULA with respect to the CUDA, cuDNN, and Tesla libraries, and the NVIDIA End User License Agreement (with NCCL Supplement) for the NCCL library.

Databricks Container Services on GPU compute

Important

This feature is in Public Preview.

You can use Databricks Container Services on compute with GPUs to create portable deep learning environments with customized libraries. See Customize containers with Databricks Container Service for instructions.

To create custom images for GPU compute, you must select a standard runtime version instead of Databricks Runtime ML for GPU. When you select Use your own Docker container, you can choose GPU compute with a standard runtime version. The custom images for GPU is based on the official CUDA containers, which is different from Databricks Runtime ML for GPU.

When you create custom images for GPU compute, you cannot change the NVIDIA driver version, because it must match the driver version on the host machine.

The databricksruntime Docker Hub contains example base images with GPU capability. The Dockerfiles used to generate these images are located in the example containers GitHub repository, which also has details on what the example images provide and how to customize them.