Theta EdgeCloud — Maximizing GPU Performance for AI with Nvidia CUDA
As Theta steadily marches towards the initial release of EdgeCloud on May 1st, Theta edge network serves as the underlying foundation for the entire platform. Today, the 10k+ globally distributed nodes largely run on Windows PCs and laptops, in addition to Mac and Linux operating systems.
In the dynamic world of GPU computing on Windows platform, Nvidia’s CUDA technology plays a pivotal role enhancing the power of GPUs to boost computational performance. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model that allows software developers to use NVIDIA GPUs for general-purpose processing tasks, beyond just graphics rendering. It is ideally suited for parallel computing tasks like scientific simulations, data analysis and AI machine learning, and applications that involve large-scale data processing and complex mathematical computations.
The ability to fully harness the power of desktop and laptop GPUs is an important step towards establishing Theta EdgeCloud as the leading hybrid cloud-distributed AI computing platform. In the next few weeks, Theta edge nodes for Windows will be updated to support CUDA. In the meantime, we ask the Theta community to update and install the necessary CUDA software prior to this upcoming release. In the future, CUDA enabled edge nodes will also be rewarded with bonus TFUEL and other TNT-20 tokens.
Following is a step-by-step guide to updating Nvidia drivers and installing the CUDA software on Windows machines.
Guide to Enabling Nvidia CUDA
- Confirm your Windows edge node has a Nvidia GPU that supports CUDA. Please check against this Nvidia list.
2. Be sure to have one of the following Microsoft Windows® operating systems:
- Microsoft Windows 11 21H2
- Microsoft Windows 11 22H2-SV2
- Microsoft Windows 10
- Microsoft Windows Server 2022
3. Update your Nvidia driver to the latest version. Open your GeForce experience application to install and update the latest drivers, or visit Nvidia here to download GeForce.
4. Download the CUDA software Toolkit from Nvidia’s official website. For example, for a Windows 11 machine:
5. Double click cuda_xxx.xx_windows.exe application to install CUDA
6. Download and install Microsoft Visual Studio for free here, as some CUDA toolkit components need it to work properly.
7. Congrats, your Windows machine should now be CUDA ready and GPU optimized for Theta edge node and EdgeCloud. The edge node software will now utilize your GPU for computation wherever possible.
