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.