[petsc-users] 32-bit vs 64-bit GPU support

[Satish Balay]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2023, Jed Brown wrote:

> Jacob Faibussowitsch <jacob.fai at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > More generally, it would be interesting to know the breakdown of installed CUDA versions for users. Unlike compilers etc, I suspect that cluster admins (and those running on local machines) are much more likely to be updating their CUDA toolkits to the latest versions as they often contain critical performance improvements.
> 
> One difference is that some sites (not looking at you at all, ALCF) still run pretty ancient drivers and/or have broken GPU-aware MPI with all but a specific ancient version of CUDA (OLCF, LLNL). With a normal compiler, you can choose to use the latest version, but with CUDA, people are firmly stuck on old versions.
> 

Well Nvidia keeps phasing out support for older GPUs in newer CUDA releases - so unless GPUs are upgraded - they can't really upgrade (to latest) CUDA versions ..

[this is in addition to the usual reasons admins don't do software upgrades... Ignore clusters - our CUDA CI machine has random stability issues - so we had to downgrade/freeze cuda/driver versions to keep the machine functional]

Satish