Nvidia plugin makes GPU acceleration possible in Docker containers

It's a conundrum: You've got deep learning software, which benefits greatly from GPU acceleration, wrapped up in a Docker container and ready to go across thousands of nodes. But wait -- apps in Docker containers can't access the GPU because they're, well, containerized. Nvidia, developer of the CUDA standard for GPU-accelerated programming, is releasing a plugin for the Docker ecosystem that makes GPU-accelerated computing possible in containers. With the plugin, applications running in a Docker container get controlled access to the GPU on the underlying hardware via Docker's own plug-in system. As Nvidia notes in a blog post, one of the early ways developers tried to work around the problem was to install Nvidia's GPU drivers inside the container and map them to the drivers on the outside.