Operating systems

This document outlines a list of accelerated operating system (OS) images that are optimized for use with AI Hypercomputer and accelerator-optimized machine types.

Accelerated OS images include essential system software to support your accelerated workloads such as the following:

  • GPU drivers that support NVIDIA H200, H100, A100, L4, and T4 GPUs

  • RDMA userspace libraries and daemons to support RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and GPUDirectRDMA for your A3 Ultra VMs

    While not set up by default, you can customize these accelerated OS images to support GPUDirect-TCPX and GPUDirect-TCPXO for your A3 Mega, A3 High, and A3 Edge VMs

  • Networking drivers to support the NVIDIA ConnectX-7 network interface cards (NICs) that are available with your A3 Ultra VMs

Accelerated OS images

The following OS images are optimized for running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads on Google Cloud. For more detailed information about each OS, see the Operating system details page in the Compute Engine documentation.

  • Rocky Linux
    • Rocky Linux 9 Accelerated
      • Image family: rocky-linux-9-optimized-gcp-nvidia-latest
      • Image project: rocky-linux-accelerator-cloud
    • Rocky Linux 8 Accelerated
      • Image family: rocky-linux-8-optimized-gcp-nvidia-latest
      • Image project: rocky-linux-accelerator-cloud
  • Ubuntu LTS
    • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Accelerated
      • Image family: ubuntu-accelerator-2404-amd64-with-nvidia-550
      • Image project: ubuntu-os-accelerator-images
    • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Accelerated
      • Image family: ubuntu-accelerator-2204-amd64-with-nvidia-550
      • Image project: ubuntu-os-accelerator-images

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