Like others, I've been very confused about instructions for how to install a specific CUDA version for the purposes of deep learning.

Today's main deep learning libraries (Tensorflow and PyTorch) don't support the latest CUDA version which is 11.2. But, when I install the recommended NVIDIA driver after a fresh Ubuntu installation, I end up getting CUDA 11.2 by default as can be seen when I run nvidia-smi

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 460.39 Driver Version: 460.39 CUDA Version: 11.2 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 GeForce RTX 3090 Off | 00000000:09:00.0 On | N/A |
| 30% 37C P8 40W / 350W | 443MiB / 24259MiB | 12% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 954 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 59MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 1470 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 161MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 1603 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 125MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2031 G ...AAAAAAAAA= --shared-files 59MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I tried following this Medium guide to downgrade CUDA to 11.0, using these instructions from NVIDIA for installing the version I want. But a couple of things are confusing me:

• Why is the Medium guide telling me to delete nvidia? I want to leave the drivers the way they are and just change CUDA.
• The rm -rf also looks scary. Feels wrong. Is it?
• I end up getting an error on trying to install CUDA 11.0. Something about lots of dependencies missing. I don't have it anymore because I've jumped ship and wiped everything for a fresh start.

4

1 Answer

Adding to Alexander's answer about unticking the driver option - here's a screenshot where you can do this. (CUDA 11.6 runfile installation on Ubuntu 22.04)

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