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The CUDA toolkit is now packaged with Rocky Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu.
This will make life easier for AI developers on these Linux distros.
It will also speed up AI development and deployments on Nvidia hardware.
AI developers use popular frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX to work on their projects. All these frameworks, in turn, rely on Nvidia's CUDA AI toolkit and libraries for high-performance AI training and inference on Nvidia GPUs.
To help developers get up to speed, Nvidia has partnered with leading enterprise Linux distributors SUSE, Canonical, and CIQ to natively package the toolkit into their enterprise Linux distros -- SUSE Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Rocky Linux.
Don't know CUDA? It's a parallel computing platform and programming model that enables software developers to use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose processing instead of graphics rendering. By leveraging thousands of GPU cores, CUDA enables massive parallelism, speeding up complex computations in fields like AI, scientific computing, machine learning, and data analysis. CUDA also provides application programming interfaces (APIs) and libraries for C, C++, Python, and other languages.
Nvidia's move from graphics to high-end development has been years in the making. Now, with CUDA, Nvidia dominates AI software almost as much as it does AI hardware.
The CUDA Toolkit will now be incorporated in the official package feeds of SUSE Linux, Ubuntu, and Rocky Linux from CIQ. This native packaging marks a significant step in democratizing GPU acceleration, enabling developers and enterprises to deploy complex, GPU-hungry applications faster and with less risk of installation or configuration mismatches.
This will also enable streamlined deployment of CUDA, which can reduce time-to-production from weeks to minutes, thus drastically shortening deployment cycles for AI workloads. The Linux vendors will also synchronize CUDA package naming with Nvidia standards and update their packages promptly after each new Nvidia release.
Perhaps most importantly, organizations deploying SUSE, Ubuntu, or Rocky Linux can access comprehensive support channels from both their Linux vendor and Nvidia's developer resources.
With SUSE, Ubuntu, and Rocky Linux joining forces with Nvidia in this initiative, industry leaders expect a new standard for Linux-based AI and High Performance Computing (HPC) out-of-the-box GPU-ready infrastructure.
"This partnership is a game-changer for the global HPC and AI ecosystem," said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ. "By integrating native Nvidia CUDA support into Rocky Linux, we eliminate deployment risks and dramatically cut time-to-production from weeks to minutes. As Rocky Linux sees rapid enterprise adoption worldwide, this collaboration enables faster innovation and reliable GPU performance at scale, from the lab to the data center to the cloud."
CIQ will provide prebuilt CUDA-enabled Rocky Linux images through its registries and major cloud marketplaces. Canonical and SUSE can also be safely presumed to do this. The day of Nvidia CUDA-ready Linux distros is here.