RAPIDS | NVIDIA Setup on Windows 10

Accredian Publication
3 min readJan 27, 2022

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Introduction

Now that you got a basic idea about GPUs and their need in data science and why technologies like RAPIDS are essential, we will show you how to set up RAPIDS on Windows 10. Let’s start.

Installation of Microsoft Insider program

For your program to run correctly, you need to be using Windows Build version 20145 or higher. When installing the builds, some things to note are:

· Start off by navigating to your Windows menu.

· Select Settings -> Update and Security -> Windows Update.

· Make sure that you don’t have any pending Windows updates.

· If you do, click the update button to ensure you’re starting out without any.

· You can cross-check for the installation steps at getting started on Microsoft Insider Program.

· Downloading and updating requires a restart and can take up to 90mins.

· Feel free to grab a cup of coffee/tea while you wait.

· After you’ve restarted your computer, check your build version by running winver via the Windows Run command.

· It can be a little tricky to identify the right number.

· Here’s what you should look for after a successful installation (BUILD 20145 or higher):

Installation of Nvidia Drivers

Next, you’ll need to install an NVIDIA Driver by keeping the following things in mind:

· Select the driver based on the type of NVIDIA GPU in your system.

· To verify your GPU type, look for the NVIDIA Control Panel in your Start menu.

· See the CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) public preview for more information.

· Once the download is complete install the driver using the executable.

· We strongly recommend choosing the default location for saving it.

· A check to ensure the driver install was successful is to run the command nvidia-smi in PowerShell.

· It should output a table with information about your GPU and the driver.

· You’ll notice the driver version is the same as the one you downloaded.

· Your table might be much shorter and not show any GPU processes.

· As long as you can see a table and no visible errors, your installation should have been successful!

· If your driver is successfully installed, let’s jump to the next step.

· If nothing appears, check if you’ve missed any of the steps and if your build version is correct.

Installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux

Please refer to the following article to perform the installation of the Windows Subsystem for Linux:

· Setting up WSL 2 in Windows 10

Installation of RAPIDS

· If you don’t have it already, start by installing and activating Miniconda in your WSL terminal.

· We’ll be using the conda command to install the packages we need in this step.

· You can install RAPIDS with a single conda command for specific CUDA version as shown below:

# for CUDA 11.0conda install -c rapidsai -c nvidia -c numba -c conda-forge \ cudf=21.06 python=3.7 cudatoolkit=11.0# or, for CUDA 11.2conda install -c rapidsai -c nvidia -c numba -c conda-forge \ cudf=21.06 python=3.7 cudatoolkit=11.2

To test your installation, start up the RAPIDS virtual environment. You can do this by:

· Typing out “conda info — envs”, which will let you know the name of the installed RAPIDS environment.

· Note: cuDF is supported only on Linux and with Python versions 3.7 and later.

· Finally, import any RAPIDS library or start a Jupyter notebook.

· And that’s it, fellas!

What’s next?

Regression in RAPIDS vs Sklearn

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