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

submitted 1 month 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] 2 points 1 month 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] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Check implementations before saying shit like that. Nvidia has historical bad open source driver support, which makes it hard for people to implement vGPU usage. They actually actively blocked us from using their cards remotely, until COVID hit. Then they gave out the code to do it. They are still limiting customer level cards usage on virtualization cases. They had to give out a toolkit for us to be able to use their cards on docker. Other cards can be accessed just by sharing dev driver files to the volume.