CUDA Minor Version Compatibility

CUDA Minor Version Compatibility (MVC) enables the use of a newer CUDA toolkit version than the CUDA version supported by the driver, provided that the toolkit and driver both have the same major version. For example, use of CUDA toolkit 11.5 with CUDA driver 450 (CUDA version 11.0) is supported through MVC.

Numba supports MVC for CUDA 11 on Linux using the external cubinlinker and ptxcompiler packages, subject to the following limitations:

• Linking of archives is unsupported.

• Cooperative Groups are unsupported, because they require an archive to be linked.

MVC is not yet supported on CUDA 12 - this will be added in a future release of Numba.

MVC is not supported on Windows.

Enabling MVC Support

To use MVC support, the cubinlinker and ptxcompiler compiler packages must be installed from the appropriate channels. To install using conda, use:

conda install rapidsai::cubinlinker conda-forge::ptxcompiler

To install with pip, use the NVIDIA package index:

pip install ptxcompiler-cu11 cubinlinker-cu11 --extra-index-url=https://pypi.nvidia.com

MVC support is enabled by setting the environment variable:

export NUMBA_CUDA_ENABLE_MINOR_VERSION_COMPATIBILITY=1

or by setting a configuration variable prior to using any CUDA functionality in Numba:

from numba import config
config.CUDA_ENABLE_MINOR_VERSION_COMPATIBILITY = True

References

Further information about Minor Version Compatibility may be found in:

• The CUDA Compatibility Guide.

• The README for ptxcompiler.