Installation and Building for Linux

Installation and Building for Linux#

Prerequisites#

If using the rocBLAS backend on an AMD machine:
- A ROCm enabled platform. Find more information on the System requirements (Linux) page.
- A compatible version of hipblas-common.
- A compatible version of rocBLAS.
- A compatible version of rocSOLVER and its dependencies, rocSPARSE and rocPRIM, for full functionality.
If using the cuBLAS backend on a Nvidia machine:
- A HIP enabled platform, more information HIP installation page.
- A working CUDA toolkit, including cuBLAS, see CUDA toolkit.

Installing pre-built packages#

Download pre-built packages either from ROCm’s native package manager or by clicking the GitHub releases tab and manually downloading, which could be newer. Release notes are available for each release on the releases tab.

Building hipBLAS from source#

Build library dependencies + library#

The root of this repository has a helper python script rmake.py to build and install hipBLAS with a single command. It does take a lot of options and hard-coded configuration that can be specified through invoking cmake directly, but it’s a great way to get started quickly and can serve as an example of how to build/install. A few commands in the script need sudo access so it may prompt you for a password.

The install script will determine the build platform by querying hipconfig --platform. This can be explicitly set via environment variable HIP_PLATFORM=amd or HIP_PLATFORM=nvidia.

Typical uses of rmake.py to build (library dependencies + library) are in the table below.

Command	Description
`python3 rmake.py -h`	Help information.
`python3 rmake.py -d`	Build library dependencies and library in your local directory. The -d flag only needs to be used once. For subsequent invocations of rmake.py it is not necessary to rebuild the dependencies.
`python3 rmake.py`	Build library in your local directory. It is assumed dependencies have been built.
`python3 rmake.py -i`	Build library, then build and install hipBLAS package in /opt/rocm/hipblas. You will be prompted for sudo access. This will install for all users. If you want to keep hipBLAS in your local directory, you do not need the -i flag.
`python3 rmake.py -n`	Build library without functionality provided by rocSOLVER. rocSOLVER, rocSPARSE, and rocPRIM dependencies will not be needed. This flag has no effect when building with cuda backend.

Build library dependencies + client dependencies + library + client#

The client contains executables in the table below.

Executable name	Description
hipblas-test	runs Google Tests to test the library
hipblas-bench	executable to benchmark or test individual functions
hipblas-example-*	various examples showing hipblas usage

Common uses of rmake.py to build (dependencies + library + client) are in the table below.

Command	Description
`python3 rmake.py -dc`	Build library dependencies, client dependencies, library, and client in your local directory. The -d flag only needs to be used once. For subsequent invocations of rmake.py it is not necessary to rebuild the dependencies.
`python3 rmake.py -c`	Build library and client in your local directory. It is assumed the dependencies have been built.
`python3 rmake.py -idc`	Build library dependencies, client dependencies, library, client, then build and install the hipBLAS package. You will be prompted for sudo access. It is expected that if you want to install for all users you use the -i flag. If you want to keep hipBLAS in your local directory, you do not need the -i flag.
`python3 rmake.py -ic`	Build and install hipBLAS package, and build the client. You will be prompted for sudo access. This will install for all users. If you want to keep hipBLAS in your local directory, you do not need the -i flag.

Dependencies for building library#

Use rmake.py with -d option to install dependencies required to build the library. This will not install the hipblas-common, rocBLAS, rocSOLVER, rocSPARSE, and rocPRIM dependencies. When building hipBLAS it is important to note version dependencies of other libraries. The hipblas-common, rocBLAS and rocSOLVER versions needed for an AMD backend build are listed in the top level CMakeLists.txt file. rocSPARSE and rocPRIM are currently dependencies of rocSOLVER. To build these libraries from source, please visit the rocBLAS Documentation, rocSOLVER Documentation, rocSPARSE Documentation, and rocPRIM Documentation.

CMake has a minimum version requirement which is currently 3.16.8. See --cmake_install flag in rmake.py to upgrade automatically.

For the test and benchmark clients’ host reference functions you must manually download and install AMD’s ILP64 version of the AOCL libraries, version 4.2, from https://www.amd.com/en/developer/aocl.html. The aocl-linux-* packages include AOCL-BLAS (aocl-blis) and AOCL-LAPACK (aocl-libflame). If you download and install the full AOCL packages into their default locations then this reference LAPACK and BLAS should be found by the clients CMakeLists.txt. Note, if you only use the rmake.py -d dependency script and change the default CMake option LINK_BLIS=ON, you may experience hipblas-test stress test failures due to 32-bit integer overflow on the host unless you exclude the stress tests via command line argument --gtest_filter=-*stress*.

Manual build (all supported platforms)#

This section has useful information on how to configure cmake and manually build.

Build Library Using Individual Commands#

mkdir -p [HIPBLAS_BUILD_DIR]/release
cd [HIPBLAS_BUILD_DIR]/release
# Default install location is in /opt/rocm, define -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path> to specify other
# Default build config is 'Release', define -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=<config> to specify other
CXX=/opt/rocm/bin/amdclang++ ccmake [HIPBLAS_SOURCE]
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install # sudo required if installing into system directory such as /opt/rocm

Build Library + Tests + Benchmarks + Samples Using Individual Commands#

The repository contains source for clients that serve as samples, tests and benchmarks. Clients source can be found in the clients subdir.

Dependencies (only necessary for hipBLAS clients)#

The hipBLAS samples have no external dependencies, but our unit test and benchmarking applications do. These clients introduce the following dependencies:

lapack, lapack itself brings a dependency on a fortran compiler
googletest

Unfortunately, googletest and lapack are not as easy to install. Many distros do not provide a googletest package with pre-compiled libraries, and the lapack packages do not have the necessary cmake config files for cmake to configure linking the cblas library. hipBLAS provide a cmake script that builds the above dependencies from source. This is an optional step; users can provide their own builds of these dependencies and help cmake find them by setting the CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH definition. The following is a sequence of steps to build dependencies and install them to the cmake default /usr/local.

(optional, one time only)#

mkdir -p [HIPBLAS_BUILD_DIR]/release/deps
cd [HIPBLAS_BUILD_DIR]/release/deps
ccmake -DBUILD_BOOST=OFF [HIPBLAS_SOURCE]/deps   # assuming boost is installed through package manager as above
make -j$(nproc) install

Once dependencies are available on the system, it is possible to configure the clients to build. This requires a few extra cmake flags to the library cmake configure script. If the dependencies are not installed into system defaults (like /usr/local ), you should pass the CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to cmake to help find them.

-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="<semicolon separated paths>"
# Default install location is in /opt/rocm, use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path> to specify other
CXX=/opt/rocm/bin/amdclang++ ccmake -DBUILD_CLIENTS_TESTS=ON -DBUILD_CLIENTS_BENCHMARKS=ON [HIPBLAS_SOURCE]
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install   # sudo required if installing into system directory such as /opt/rocm