Retaining per device primary context is preferred to creating a context owned by the plugin.
From CUDA documentation
- Note that the use of multiple CUcontext s per device within a single process will substantially degrade performance and is strongly discouraged. Instead, it is highly recommended that the implicit one-to-one device-to-context mapping for the process provided by the CUDA Runtime API be used." from https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-runtime-api/group__CUDART__DRIVER.html
- Right under cuCtxCreate. In most cases it is recommended to use cuDevicePrimaryCtxRetain. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-driver-api/group__CUDA__CTX.html#group__CUDA__CTX_1g65dc0012348bc84810e2103a40d8e2cf
- The primary context is unique per device and shared with the CUDA runtime API. These functions allow integration with other libraries using CUDA. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-driver-api/group__CUDA__PRIMARY__CTX.html#group__CUDA__PRIMARY__CTX
Two issues are addressed by this patch:
- Not using the primary context caused interoperability issue with libraries like cublas, cusolver. CUBLAS_STATUS_EXECUTION_FAILED and cudaErrorInvalidResourceHandle
- On OLCF summit, "Error returned from cuCtxCreate" and "CUDA error is: invalid device ordinal"
Regarding the flags of the primary context. If it is inactive, we set CU_CTX_SCHED_BLOCKING_SYNC. If it is already active, we respect the current flags.
We should initialize these, I never trust runtime calls to do that for some reason.