Connect to a Windows GPU node

Connecting to a Windows GPU node is the same RDP flow as any Windows node. The only addition is confirming the driver once you are in; for the full connect reference, RDP clients, retrieving the Administrator password, security group rules, see Connect to a Windows node.

Connect over RDP

Open your RDP client and enter the node’s public IP, Administrator as the user, and the password from the secure password email.

Check that the NVIDIA driver sees the card

After your first login, confirm the GPU is present and the driver loaded.

Device Manager. Right-click Start > Device Manager, expand Display adapters, and confirm the GPU is listed, for example NVIDIA A40 or NVIDIA L40S. Right-click it, choose Properties > Driver, and confirm a driver version and date are present with a status of “This device is working properly.”

nvidia-smi in PowerShell. The Windows driver installer also installs nvidia-smi.exe:

nvidia-smi

A healthy node prints the card, driver version, CUDA version, memory, and utilization, the same fields as on a Linux GPU node. With nothing running, utilization reads near 0%. If Device Manager shows Microsoft Basic Display Adapter instead of the card, or nvidia-smi reports it cannot communicate with the driver, see Troubleshooting GPU Node. Once the card checks out and your software is installed, save the node as an image. Every new node then starts with the same setup; see Save and reuse a GPU image.

WDDM and TCC display modes

The NVIDIA driver on Windows runs a card in one of two modes. WDDM, short for Windows Display Driver Model, lets the card draw a desktop, and RDP needs it. A Windows GPU node starts in WDDM. TCC, short for Tesla Compute Cluster, turns the card into a compute-only device: it can give a small speed-up for a job that needs no desktop, but the RDP desktop no longer draws through that card. Stay on WDDM unless you run compute jobs only and never need the desktop.

To switch, open PowerShell as an administrator and run one of these, then reboot the node:

nvidia-smi -dm 0     # WDDM, display and compute
nvidia-smi -dm 1     # TCC, compute only; the RDP desktop no longer draws through this card

To check the current mode, run nvidia-smi: the mode shows next to the card’s name.

Everything else, password changes, RDP client tuning, security group rules, Access Console recovery, works the same as any Windows node; see Connect to a Windows node.