Document Updates¶

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

May 2021¶

Published a new technical note on the implementation and performance of BERT-Large on Graphcore IPU-POD systems: Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning BERT for the IPU
The V-IPU Administrator Guide has been updated with a new chapter on monitoring application metrics using Prometheus and InfluxDB.

A new technical note has been published with an overview of how to add custom operations in PyTorch, TensorFlow and PopART: Creating Custom Operations for the IPU.
The technical note Model parallelism with TensorFlow: sharding and pipelining was revised to be consistent with SDK 2.0, and with the addition of content on pipelining Keras models in TensorFlow 2.
The “Writing custom operations” chapter in the TensorFlow 1 and TensorFlow 2 user guides has been completely rewritten,
New tutorials have been added on using half and mixed-precision floating point in PopTorch and TensorFlow 1, and efficient data loading with PopTorch

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

The Graphcore 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 Targeting the IPU from TensorFlow 1 has been updated with an improved explanation of the role of XLA.

For full details of all the changes in this release, see the Poplar® SDK v2.0.0 Release notes.

The main documentation changes are:

Additions to:
New: PopDist and PopRun: User Guide documents the tool for running distributed programs and the associated PopDist library.
New and updated functions in the Poplar and PopLibs API Reference:
- 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.
- PopVision trace instrumentation library in the Poplar User Guide
- PopVision trace instrumentation library (PVTI) API
- PopVision analysis C++ API
- PopVision Analysis Python API

There is now a contents page listing the examples and tutorials available on GitHub.
The IPU-M2000 DA system has been renamed to Getting Started with IPU-POD4 DA and IPU-POD16 DA and updated.

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