Can nvidia-docker be run without a GPU?

nvidia-docker is a shortcut for docker --runtime nvidia. I do hope they merge it one day, but for now it's a 3rd party runtime. They explain what it is and what it does on their GitHub page.

A modified version of runc adding a custom pre-start hook to all containers. If environment variable NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES is set in the OCI spec, the hook will configure GPU access for the container by leveraging nvidia-container-cli from project libnvidia-container.

Nothing stops you from running images meant for nvidia-docker with normal docker. They work just fine but if you run something in them that requires the GPU, that will fail.

I don't think you can run nvidia-docker on a machine without a GPU. It won't be able to find the CUDA files it's looking for and will error out.

To create an image that can run on both docker and nvidia-docker, your program inside it needs to be able to know where it's running. I am not sure if there's an official way, but you can try one of the following:

• Check if nvidia-smi is available
• Check if the directory specified in $CUDA_LIB_PATH exists
• Check if your program can load the CUDA libraries successfully, and if it can't just fallback