Agent skill · NVIDIA
holoscan-install-container
Install Holoscan SDK via the NGC Docker container. Use for container-based installs; not for native apt/pip/Conda installs.
What it needs
About 4k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Holoscan NGC Container Installation Purpose Pull and verify the official Holoscan SDK container from NGC (nvcr.io/nvidia/clara-holoscan/holoscan), selecting the right CUDA/arch tag for the host GPU and validating with the bundled Python and C++ examples. Prerequisites Linux host with an NVIDIA GPU and a working driver (nvidia-smi). Docker installed and the user in the docker group (or sudo). NVIDIA Container Toolkit installed (docker run --gpus all works). ~10–20 GB free disk for the image pull. Network access to nvcr.io and docs.nvidia.com. Limitations Container images cover only the tag matrix below — no Conda/pip env inside. GUI examples require X11 forwarding; this skill runs Holoviz headless to avoid that. Tag suffix must match the host GPU/driver (cuda13 / cuda12-dgpu / cuda12-igpu) — wrong suffix → CUDA init failures. Instructions Container repo: nvcr.io/nvidia/clara-holoscan/holoscan. The doc page at https://docs.nvidia.com/holoscan/sdk-user-guide/sdkinstallation.html is canonical — fetch it if anything below disagrees. Work through the steps below in order: pick the tag, verify GPU passthrough and pull, verify with the six examples, then hand off the launch command. Step 1: Pick the tag Tag = <version>-<suffix>, e.g. v4.1.0-cuda13. Get the current SDK version from the doc page above; pick the suffix from nvidia-smi (the "CUDA Version" field, top-right of the table header): nvidia-smi CUDA Version Suffix --- --- 13.x+ cuda13 12.x, Ampere/Ada dGPU cuda12-dgpu 12.x, ARM64 iGPU (nvgpu) cuda12-igpu The "CUDA Forward Compatibility mode ENABLED" banner is expected — not an error — when the container ships a newer CUDA minor version than the host driver supports. The forward-compat shim lets the container's CUDA runtime work against the older host driver within the same major version. Step 2: Verify GPU passthrough, then pull If Docker is missing → install from https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills NVIDIA/holoscan-install-container