“The NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit is a software development kit that helps users create GPU-accelerated applications. It includes libraries, compilers, debuggers, and optimization tools”. Since we have an Nvidia GPU we will install it as shown below.

Note: If you installed the nvidia-cuda-toolkit from default ubuntu noble repo, uninstall it first as that version is probably too old. Uninstall with “sudo apt purge nvidia-cuda* -y“

# wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2204/x86_64/cuda-ubuntu2204.pin

First we wget the Nvidia Cuda Repository pin as shown above. Then we move it to /etc/apt/preferences.d/ (shown below).

This is a configuration file that is used to prioritize packages from the NVIDIA CUDA repository when installing CUDA on a Linux system. Basically it tells apt where to get the Cuda Toolkit.

$ sudo mv cuda-ubuntu2204.pin /etc/apt/preferences.d/cuda-repository-pin-600

Now we wget the repo. Note that this is a pretty hefty .deb and may take a few minutes.

$ wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/12.8.0/local_installers/cuda-repo-ubuntu2204-12-8-local_12.8.0-570.86.10-1_amd64.deb

And install it.

$ sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu2204-12-8-local_12.8.0-570.86.10-1_amd64.deb
$ sudo cp /var/cuda-repo-ubuntu2204-12-8-local/cuda-*-keyring.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/

Finally we install the toolkit.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install cuda-toolkit-12-8
$ sudo apt install cuda-runtime-12-8

Nvidia states that you need to add the following env vars to your .bashrc, however you will also need to add them to your python virtual env — in venv/bin/activate. These variables will be needed during the install process below.

 export CUDA_HOME=/usr/local/cuda                           
 export PATH=${CUDA_HOME}/bin:${PATH}                       
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${CUDA_HOME}/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Update $PATH

The the following to your path

/usr/local/cuda-12.8/bin

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Reference

1. https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads