If you just import torch without running or creating any CUDA operations or tensors, the GPU memory should be empty (a CUDA context might be initialized, but wouldn’t show up in torch.cuda.memory_allocated()).
For the CUDNN_STATUS_INTERAL_ERROR:
could you please post a reproducible code snippet?
Also, did you install the PyTorch binaries or built from source? Which GPU are you currently using and is the code running fine on the CPU?