TECHNICAL
WHITE PAPER
CONTENTS & NAVIGATION
2
Introduction
2
Software Considerations
2-3
Hardware Considerations
3-4
Operating System Conguration
4
Monitoring NVIDIA® NVLink™ Status
USING HP WORKSTATIONS WITH
NVIDIA® NVLINK™ FOR NVIDIA®
PRO GRAPHICS CARDS
1.
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS &
NAVIGATION
2
Introduction
2
Software Considerations
2-3
Hardware Considerations
3-4
Operating System Conguration
4
Monitoring NVIDIA® NVLink™ Status
HP Workstations are fully equipped to allow users to take advantage of a new NVIDIA® technology – NVIDIA®
NVLink™. In a nutshell, NVIDIA® NVLink™ allows two matching graphics cards to communicate directly via
a high-speed interconnection eectively allowing the available memory of both GPUs to be combined.
This allows for applications and workloads designed with NVIDIA® NVLink™ in mind to benet from signicant
performance increases.
For more information, please review NVIDIA's documentation and examples:
• https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/nvlink-bridges/
SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS
To take advantage of NVIDIA® NVLink™ software must be explicitly designed to do so. Unlike some other
multi-GPU methods, NVIDIA® NVLink™ is dierent in that simply connecting NVIDIA® NVLink™ bridges does not
automatically benet a workload or use case; software must be designed with NVIDIA® NVLink™ in mind and
written in a way to take full advantage of it.
NVIDIA provides free SDKs and documentation which enable a software developer to include NVIDIA® NVLink™
support in their applications. Specically, NVIDIA® CUDA® SDK and NCCL are minimum requirements for
NVIDIA® NVLink™ enablement in software. These resources can be found here:
• https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit
• https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/
• https://developer.nvidia.com/nccl
2.
In addition to having compatible software, NVIDIA® NVLink™-capable hardware must be correctly installed
and congured to take advantage of NVIDIA® NVLink™.
HARDWARE CONSIDERATIONS
NVIDIA® NVLink™ is supported with HP Z8 G4, HP Z4 G4, and HP Z840 Workstations that have been properly
congured.
To prepare your system for use with NVIDIA® NVLink™ the following hardware must be installed in a
supported system:
• 2x NVIDIA® NVLink™-capable NVIDIA® cards, such as NVIDIA® RTX™ A6000 or NVIDIA® Quadro® GV100
• Please note, GPU generation mixing is not supported; the cards must be exact matches
(ie. 2x NVIDIA® Quadro® GV100)
•
NVIDIA® NVLink™ only works between exactly 2 cards (ie. 3-way NVIDIA® NVLink™
is not possible)