MXNet

MXNet is a deep learning framework that has been ported to the HIP port of MXNet. It works both on HIP/ROCm and HIP/CUDA platforms. Mxnet makes use of rocBLAS,rocRAND,hcFFT and MIOpen APIs.

MXNet

../_images/MXNet_image1.png

Installation Guide for MXNet library

Prerequisites

GCC 4.8 or later to compile C++ 11. GNU Make

ROCm installation

Follow the instructions from here -ROCm Installation Guide

Install Dependencies to build mxnet for HIP/ROCm

sudo apt-get install rocm-device-libs rocm-libs rocblas hipblas rocrand
sudo apt-get install rocm-opencl rocm-opencl-dev rocm-utils
sudo apt-get install miopengemm miopen-hip

Install hcfft from source

Install Dependencies to build mxnet for HIP/CUDA

Install CUDA following the NVIDIA’s installation guide to setup MXNet with GPU support

Note

  • Make sure to add CUDA install path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH

  • Example - export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda/lib64/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Install the dependencies hipblas, rocrand, hcfft from source.

Build the MXNet library

Step 1: Install build tools.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

Step 2: Install OpenBLAS. MXNet uses BLAS and LAPACK libraries for accelerated numerical computations on CPU machine. There are several flavors of BLAS/LAPACK libraries - OpenBLAS, ATLAS and MKL. In this step we install OpenBLAS. You can choose to install ATLAS or MKL.

$ sudo apt-get install -y libopenblas-dev liblapack-dev libomp-dev libatlas-dev libatlas-base-dev

Step 3: Install `OpenCV <https://opencv.org/>`_. MXNet uses OpenCV for efficient image loading and augmentation operations.

$ sudo apt-get install -y libopencv-dev

Step 4: Download MXNet sources and build MXNet core shared library.

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/mxnet.git
$ cd mxnet
$ export PATH=/opt/rocm/bin:$PATH

Step 5:

To compile on HCC PLATFORM(HIP/ROCm):

$ export HIP_PLATFORM=hcc

To compile on NVCC PLATFORM(HIP/CUDA):

$ export HIP_PLATFORM=nvcc

Step 6:

If building on CPU:

make -jn(n=number of cores) USE_CUDA=0

If building on GPU:

make -jn(n=number of cores) USE_CUDA=1

Step 7: To enable MIOpen for higher acceleration :

make -jn(n=number of cores) USE_CUDNN=1

NOTE: Currently this feature is under development

On succesfull compilation a library called libmxnet.so is created in mxnet/lib path.

Note:

  1. USE_CUDA, USE_CUDNN flags can be changed in make/config.mk.

  2. To compile on HIP/CUDA make sure to set USE_CUDA_PATH to right CUDA installation path in make/config.mk. In most cases it is - /usr/local/cuda.

Install the MXNet Python binding

Step 1: Install prerequisites - python, setup-tools, python-pip and numpy.

$ sudo apt-get install -y python-dev python-setuptools python-numpy python-pip

Step 2: Install the MXNet Python binding.

$ cd python
$ sudo python setup.py install

Step 3: Execute sample example

$ cd example/
$ cd bayesian-methods/
To run on gpu change mx.cpu() to mx.gpu() in python script (Example- bdk_demo.py)
$ python bdk_demo.py