Development setup¶

This section is a complement to the Advanced installation guide section, with the goal of setting up a development environment and a development version of the package.

For convenience, we suggest creating a virtual environment as a way to isolate your development environment:

$ python3 -m venv aihwkit_env
$ cd aihwkit_env
$ source bin/activate
(aihwkit_env) $

Downloading the source¶

The first step is downloading the source of the library:

(aihwkit_env) $ git clone https://github.com/IBM/aihwkit.git
(aihwkit_env) $ cd aihwkit

Note

The following sections assume that the command line examples are executed in the activated aihwkit_env environment, and from the folder where the sources have been cloned.

Compiling the library for development¶

After installing the requirements listed in the Advanced installation guide section, the shared library can be compiled using the following convenience command:

$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

This will produce a shared library under the src/aihwkit/simulator directory, without installing the package.

As an alternative, you can use cmake directly for finer control over the compilation and for easier debugging potential issues:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
build$ cmake ..
build$ make

Compilation flags¶

There are several cmake options that can be used for customizing the compilation process:

Flag	Description	Default
`USE_CUDA`	Build with CUDA support	`OFF`
`BUILD_TEST`	Build the C++ test binaries	`OFF`
`RPU_BLAS`	BLAS backend of choice (`OpenBLAS` or `MKL`)	`OpenBLAS`
`RPU_USE_FASTMOD`	Use fast mod	`ON`
`RPU_USE_FASTRAND`	Use fastrand	`OFF`
`RPU_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES`	Target CUDA architectures	`60`

The options can be passed both to setuptools or to cmake directly. For example, for compiling with CUDA support:

$ python setup.py install -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DRPU_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES="60;70"

or if using cmake directly:

build$ cmake -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DRPU_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES="60;70" ..

Note

If you are installing the package in editable mode for development (via. pip install -e .), please be aware that under most circumstances the actual package sources will not be appended to the Python path. You might need to add the src/ folder to your PYTHONPATH accordingly (for example, via export PYTHONPATH=src/).