Document Updates

The main updates to the documents are summarised below. In addition there will have been many improvements and corrections.

March 2021

These update is mainly to support the release of Poplar SDK 2.0.

Updates since SDK 2.0

Since the SDK release, the following documents have been updated:

  • The Command Line Tools document has been updated to 1.0.51. This adds a description of the information returned by the gc-info --tile-overview option and documents the new gc-exchangewritetest command.

  • The TensorFlow 1 User Guide has been updated with an improved explanation of the role of XLA.

SDK 2.0 release

For full details of all the changes in this release, see the Release Notes.

The main documentation changes are:

  • Additions to TensorFlow 1, TensorFlow 2 and PopTorch documents.

  • The PopRun tool for running distributed programs and the associated PopDist library are now documented.

  • New and updated functions in the Poplar API:

    • New libraries:

      • poplar/DebugContext.hpp

      • poplar/TensorRearranger.hpp

      • poplin/Cholesky.hpp

      • poplin/TriangularSolve.hpp

      • popnn/CTCLoss.hpp

      • popnn/LogSoftmax.hpp

      • popnn/Rnn.hpp

      • popops/CollectiveTypes.hpp

      • popops/SequenceSlice.hpp

      • popops/SortOrder.hpp

      • popops/TopK.hpp

      • popsparse/MatMulParams.hpp

      • poputil/OptionParsing.hpp

      • poputil/TensorMetaData.hpp

    • Changes:

      • Renamed poplar/CycleEstimateFunc.hpp to poplar/PerfEstimateFunc.hpp

      • Renamed popops/Collectives.hpp to popops/TensorCollectives.hpp

  • The PopVision trace instrumentation (PVTI) and PopVision analysis (PVA) libraries are now included in the in Poplar docs.

Other changes

November 2020

This includes the release of Poplar SDK 1.4, the IPU-M2000, the IPU-POD reference design and the supporting software tools.