ollama/docs/tutorials/nvidia-jetson.md

Running Ollama on NVIDIA Jetson Devices

With some minor configuration, Ollama runs well on NVIDIA Jetson Devices. The following has been tested on JetPack 5.1.2.

NVIDIA Jetson devices are Linux-based embedded AI computers that are purpose-built for AI applications.

Jetsons have an integrated GPU that is wired directly to the memory controller of the machine. For this reason, the nvidia-smi command is unrecognized, and Ollama proceeds to operate in "CPU only" mode. This can be verified by using a monitoring tool like jtop.

In order to address this, we simply pass the path to the Jetson's pre-installed CUDA libraries into ollama serve (while in a tmux session). We then hardcode the num_gpu parameters into a cloned version of our target model.

Prerequisites:

• curl
• tmux

Here are the steps:

• Install Ollama via standard Linux command (ignore the 404 error): curl https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
• Stop the Ollama service: sudo systemctl stop ollama
• Start Ollama serve in a tmux session called ollama_jetson and reference the CUDA libraries path: tmux has-session -t ollama_jetson 2>/dev/null || tmux new-session -d -s ollama_jetson 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda/lib64 ollama serve'
• Pull the model you want to use (e.g. mistral): ollama pull mistral
• Create a new Modelfile specifically for enabling GPU support on the Jetson: touch ModelfileMistralJetson
• In the ModelfileMistralJetson file, specify the FROM model and the num_gpu PARAMETER as shown below:

FROM mistral
PARAMETER num_gpu 999

• Create a new model from your Modelfile: ollama create mistral-jetson -f ./ModelfileMistralJetson
• Run the new model: ollama run mistral-jetson

If you run a monitoring tool like jtop you should now see that Ollama is using the Jetson's integrated GPU.

And that's it!