Enabling GPU sharing on a Linux NICE DCV Server

With GPU sharing, you can share one or more physical GPUs between multiple NICE DCV virtual sessions. For more information about sessions, see Managing NICE DCV sessions. Using GPU sharing, you can use a single NICE DCV server and host multiple virtual sessions that share the server's physical GPU resources.

Note

GPU sharing is only supported on Linux NICE DCV servers.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, complete the following prerequisites:

• Install the NICE DCV server on a Linux server.

• Install the NICE DCV dcv-gl and nice-Xdcv packages on the server.

• Ensure that the server has at least one supported NVIDIA GPU.

• Install the NVIDIA GPU driver on the server. The official NVIDIA drivers are required. The open-source NVIDIA drivers aren't supported.

• Ensure that the NVIDIA GPU driver supports hardware-accelerated OpenGL.

• Install an X Server and configure the Device and Screen sections in the xorg.conf file.

  Note

  You can use the nvidia-xconfig NVIDIA utility to automatically create an xorg.conf file and configure it for all the available NVIDIA GPUs.

• Ensure that the X Server is running.

• (Optional) Verify the NICE DCV server configuration by running the dcvgldiag tool. For more information, see Post-Installation checks.

  You can also install the nice-dcv-gltest package and run the dcvgltest test application to check if the server is properly configured for GPU sharing.

To enable GPU sharing, you must specify the list of GPUs to be used by the virtual sessions. If you don't specify the GPUs, only the GPU used by the standard X Server, with the display name :0.0, is used.

Specify the GPUs in the gl-displays parameter in the dcv.conf file after you complete the prerequisites that are described earlier in this topic.

To enable GPU sharing on a Linux NICE DCV server

1. Navigate to /etc/dcv/ and open the dcv.conf file with your preferred text editor.

2. Add the [display/linux] section and the gl-displays parameter. Then, specify the available GPUs in the following format:

   [display/linux]
   gl-displays = [':xserver_port.screen_number_1',':xserver_port.screen_number_2', ...]

   Where xserver_port is the server and screen_number is the number that's associated with the screen related to the GPU. screen_number starts from 0.

   The following example shows the gl-displays parameter for two GPUs running on the default X Server session:

   [display/linux]
   gl-displays = [':0.0',':0.1']

3. Save and close the file.

4. Stop and restart the NICE DCV server.