def get_gpu_count () -> int:
    """
Special handling for detecting GPU availability: an approach
recommended by the NVidia RAPIDS engineering team, since `nvml`
bindings are difficult for Python libraries to keep updated.

    returns:
count of available GPUs
    """
    try:
        import pynvml  # type: ignore  # pylint: disable=E0401
        pynvml.nvmlInit()

        gpu_count = pynvml.nvmlDeviceGetCount()
    except Exception: # pylint: disable=W0703
        gpu_count = 0

    return gpu_count