p3.8xlarge instance AMI no nvidia drivers preinstalled correctly

It's unusual for the Deep Learning AMI you're using to have issues with NVIDIA drivers, as these AMIs typically come pre-configured with the necessary drivers. However, problems can occasionally occur, especially with spot instances that may have been previously used and terminated.

The error message "NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver" suggests that there might be a conflict or issue with the driver installation. This could be due to multiple driver versions, as you suspect, or other configuration problems.

To resolve this issue on your spot instance without rebooting, you can try the following steps:

1. First, check if the NVIDIA kernel module is loaded:

lsmod | grep nvidia

If it's not listed, try loading it manually:

sudo modprobe nvidia

2. If the module doesn't load, check for any error messages in the system log:

sudo dmesg | grep nvidia

3. Verify the installed NVIDIA driver version:

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version

4. If you find multiple driver versions, you may need to remove the conflicting versions and reinstall the correct one. However, this process typically requires a reboot, which isn't ideal for spot instances.

5. As a temporary workaround, you could try restarting the NVIDIA persistence daemon:

sudo service nvidia-persistenced restart

6. If none of these steps work, you might need to consider using a different AMI or creating a custom AMI with the correct drivers pre-installed and tested.

For future instances, to avoid this issue, you could create a custom AMI from a successfully configured instance or use AWS Deep Learning Containers, which provide consistent environments across different instance types.

Remember that spot instances can be interrupted at any time, so it's crucial to have a robust setup process that can quickly configure the environment if needed. Consider incorporating these driver checks and fixes into your instance initialization script.

If the problem persists across multiple launches with this AMI, it may be worth reporting the issue to AWS support, as there could be an underlying problem with the AMI itself.
Sources
NVIDIA drivers for your Amazon EC2 instance - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Using the Deep Learning Base AMI - Deep Learning AMI