GPUs and instances¶
Anbox Cloud has support for managing GPUs and can provide them to individual instances for rendering and video encoding functionality.
Important
This topic is applicable only for container instances because Anbox Cloud currently does not support GPU provisioning for virtual machines. This feature is planned for a future release.
Anbox Cloud automatically detects GPU devices during the deployment and configures the cluster to use them. If no GPU is available, Anbox Cloud automatically falls back to the null platform that does not perform any rendering. See Configuration for null platform for the null platform configuration.
However, you can enable software rendering and video encoding by launching your application with the --enable-graphics flag. This makes it possible to run entirely without a GPU and still use rendering.
Required GPU slots¶
GPUs have limited capacity that can be shared amongst multiple instances. To fine-tune how many instances can run on a given node, configure the number of available GPU slots on the node.
See GPU slots for detailed information.
Using GPUs inside an instance¶
AMS configures each LXD instance to pass through a GPU device from the host. Currently, all GPUs that are available to a machine are passed to every instance that owns a GPU slot. For NVIDIA GPUs, LXD uses the NVIDIA container runtime to make the GPU driver of the host available to the instance.
Check the list of supported GPUs (Supported GPU vendors and models) to see if Anbox Cloud includes a driver for your GPU device. If a GPU driver is available inside the instance, there are no further differences in how to use it in comparison to a regular environment. If no GPU driver is available, you must provide it through an addon.
If you want to let an application use the GPU (even if you are not interested in streaming the visual output), launch it with the --enable-graphics flag. With this flag, the command will launch the instance using the webrtc platform, which will automatically detect the underlying GPU and make use of it.
amc launch --enable-graphics my-application
Force software rendering and video encoding¶
It is possible to instruct an instance to run with software rendering. To do so, change the Resources of the application to not require a GPU. Anbox Cloud will then automatically determine that no GPU is available and use software rendering instead if an instance is launched with graphics enabled.
Since software rendering and video encoding will utilise the CPU, you won’t be able to run as many instances on a system when compared to running instances with a GPU.