Installation and Building for Windows

Installation and Building for Windows#

Prerequisites#

An AMD HIP SDK enabled platform. More information can be found here.
rocBLAS is supported on the same Windows versions and toolchains that are supported by the HIP SDK.
As the AMD HIP SDK is new and quickly evolving it will have more up to date information regarding the SDK’s internal contents. Thus it may overrule statements found in this section on installing and building for Windows.

Installing Prebuilt Packages#

rocBLAS can be installed on Windows 11 or Windows 10 using the AMD HIP SDK installer.

The simplest way to use rocBLAS in your code would be using CMake for which you would add the SDK installation location to your CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. Note you need to use quotes as the path contains a space, e.g.,

-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\Program Files\AMD\ROCm\5.5"

in your CMake configure step and then in your CMakeLists.txt use

find_package(rocblas)

target_link_libraries( your_exe PRIVATE roc::rocblas )

Example code of consuming rocBLAS on windows with CMake can be found at rocBLAS-Examples github page.

Otherwise once installed, rocBLAS can be used just like any other library with a C API. The rocblas.h header file must be included in the user code to make calls into rocBLAS, and the rocBLAS import library and dynamic link library will become respective link-time and run-time dependencies for the user application. Note an additional runtime dependency beyond the dynamic link library (.dll) file is the entire rocblas/ subdirectory found in the HIP SDK bin folder. This must be kept in the same directory as the rocblas.dll or can be located elsewhere if setting the environment variable ROCBLAS_TENSILE_LIBPATH to the non-standard location. The contents are read at execution time much like additional DLL files.

Once installed, find rocblas.h in the HIP SDK \include\rocblas directory. Only use these two installed files when needed in user code. Find other rocBLAS included files in HIP SDK \include\rocblas\internal, however, do not include these files directly into source code.

Building and Installing rocBLAS#

For most users, building from source is not necessary, as rocBLAS can be used after installing the prebuilt packages as described above. If desired, users can use the following instructions to build rocBLAS from source. The codebase used for rocBLAS for the HIP SDK is the same as used for linux ROCm distribution. However as these two distributions have different stacks the code and build process have subtle variations.

Requirements#

As a rough estimate, 64GB of system memory is required for a full rocBLAS build. This value can be lower if rocBLAS is built with a different Tensile logic target (see the –logic command from rmake.py –help). This value may also increase in the future as more functions are added to rocBLAS and dependencies such as Tensile grow.

Download rocBLAS#

The rocBLAS source code, which is the same as for the ROCm linux distributions, is available at the rocBLAS github page. The version of the ROCm HIP SDK may be shown in the path of default installation, but you can run the HIP SDK compiler to report the verison from the bin/ folder with:

hipcc --version

The HIP version has major, minor, and patch fields, possibly followed by a build specific identifier. For example, HIP version could be 5.4.22880-135e1ab4; this corresponds to major = 5, minor = 4, patch = 22880, build identifier 135e1ab4. There are GitHub branches at the rocBLAS site with names release/rocm-rel-major.minor where major and minor are the same as in the HIP version. For example for you can use the following to download rocBLAS:

git clone -b release/rocm-rel-x.y https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS.git
cd rocBLAS

Replace x.y in the above command with the version of HIP SDK installed on your machine. For example, if you have HIP 5.5 installed, then use -b release/rocm-rel-5.5 You can can add the SDK tools to your path with an entry like:

%HIP_PATH%\bin

Building#

Below are steps to build using the rmake.py script. The user can install dependencies and build either:

dependencies + library
dependencies + library + client

You only need (dependencies + library) if you call rocBLAS from your code and only want the library built. The client contains testing and benchmark tools. rmake.py will print to the screen the full cmake command being used to configure rocBLAS based on your rmake command line options. This full cmake command can be used in your own build scripts if you want to bypass the python helper script for a fixed set of build options.

Library Dependencies#

Dependencies installed by the python script rdeps.py are listed in the rdeps.xml configuration file. The -d flag passed to rmake.py installs dependencies the same as if running rdeps.py directly. Currently rdeps.py uses vcpkg and pip to install the build dependencies, with vcpkg being cloned into environment variable VCPKG_PATH or defaults into C:\github\vckpg. pip will install into your current python3 environment.

The minimum version requirement for CMake is listed in the top level CMakeLists.txt file. CMake installed with Visual Studio 2022 meets this requirement. The vcpkg version tag is specified at the top of the rdeps.py file.

Build Library dependencies + Library#

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

Command	Description
`./rmake.py -h`	Help information.
`./rmake.py -d`	Build library dependencies and library in your local directory. The -d flag only needs to be used once.
`./rmake.py`	Build library. It is assumed dependencies have been built.
`./rmake.py -i`	Build library, then build and install rocBLAS package. If you want to keep rocBLAS in your local tree, you do not need the -i flag.

Build Library Dependencies + Client Dependencies + Library + Client#

Some client executables (.exe) are listed in the table below:

executable name	description
rocblas-test	runs Google Tests to test the library
rocblas-bench	executable to benchmark or test functions
rocblas-example-sscal	example C code calling rocblas_sscal function

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

Command	Description
`./rmake.py -h`	Help information.
`./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.
`./rmake.py -c`	Build library and client in your local directory. It is assumed the dependencies have been installed.
`./rmake.py -idc`	Build library dependencies, client dependencies, library, client, then build and install the rocBLAS package. If you want to keep rocBLAS in your local directory, you do not need the -i flag.
`./rmake.py -ic`	Build and install rocBLAS package, and build the client. If you want to keep rocBLAS in your local directory, you do not need the -i flag.

Build Clients without Library#

The rocBLAS clients can be built on their own using rmake.py with a pre-existing rocBLAS library.

Note that the version of the rocBLAS clients being built should match the version of the installed rocBLAS. You can determine the version of the installed rocBLAS in the HIP SDK directory from the file include\rocblas\internal\rocblas-version.h. Find the version of rocBLAS being built if you have grep (e.g. in a git bash) with command grep "VERSION_STRING" CMakeLists.txt in the rocBLAS directory where you are building the clients.

Command	Description
`./rmake.py --clients-only`	Build rocBLAS clients and use an installed rocBLAS library at HIP_PATH if no –library-path specified
`./rmake.py --clients-only` `--library-path /path/to/rocBLAS`	Build rocBLAS clients and use a rocBLAS library at the specified location.