Installing Bluefog

Bluefog currently supports MacOS and Linux only.

Installing Bluefog from Pip (CPU)

Installing from pip should be sufficient for most Bluefog users. However, our implementation highly independent on the MPI and other libraries. Please make sure that python>=3.7 and gcc>=4.0 and supporting std=C++11 in your development environment. We recommend using conda as python environment control. Most dependent python package should be automatically installed through the pip. Lastly, we relied on the MPI implementation, please install open-mpi>=4.0 download link and instruction for CPU usage. After you think the environment is all set, just run following command to install Bluefog:

pip install --no-cache-dir bluefog

Note

If --no-cache-dir is not present, you may receive the error information like Failed building wheel for bluefog, which won’t fail the installation though. The reason is Bluefog is a library with C-extention, which needs to be built on your system. Check this stack overflow answer if you are interested.

Installing Bluefog from Pip (GPU)

All steps for GPU case are the same as CPU case except for the OpenMPI installation. In order to get full support of GPU, you have to install CUDA>=10.0 and install pytorch and/or tensorflow with the GPU support version. To maximize the efficiency of GPU and MPI, our implementation assumes the MPI installed is GPU-aware if GPU is available. It will avoid the extra cost that copy and moving the data from the GPU and host memory, i.e. the address of GPU location can be used directly. However, if MPI built is not GPU-aware, there will be a segmentation fault. To do that, you can configure the open install setting after the download of OpenMPI:

./configure --prefix={YOUR_OWN_PREFIX} --with-cuda && \
make -j $(nproc) all && \
make install

Installing Bluefog from Github Directly

First, please check your environment as mentioned in above subsections. Then, clone or download the bluefog repository from Github. Last, just run the following command under the root folder of bluefog repository:

pip install .

Use Bluefog through Docker

To be added.