The NVIDIA Persistence Daemon is a userspace daemon on Linux to support persistence of driver state across Cuda job runs. The daemon targets all current Tesla, Quadro and GRID GPUs. For further information, see https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/driver-persistence/index.html The driver now includes rc.nvidia-persistenced as an option. While it can be run as root, it is more secure to run it as an unpriveleged user, so we run it as user nvidia. To install it, Pass PERSISTENCED=yes to the script. It will create the user and group nvidia, and install rc.nvidia-persistenced to /etc/rc.d. To activate the daemon, add the following to /etc/rc.d/local: # Start the nvidia-persistenced daemon: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.nvidia-persistenced ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.nvidia-persistenced start fi and then 'chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.nvidia-persistenced' to make it executable. Add the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown: # Stop the nvidia-persistenced daemon: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.nvidia-persistenced ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.nvidia-persistenced stop fi NOTE: This may not work on all systems. If you encounter problems with it, just 'chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.persistenced' and it will no longer load. YMMV.