2. Setup for this Quick Start guide

This chapter describes the setup steps that are specific for running the application in this Quick Start guide.

2.1. Clone the Graphcore examples repo

You need to clone the Graphcore examples repository on some systems as detailed in Table 2.1.

Table 2.1 Systems that need the Graphcore tutorials and examples repositories to be cloned

System

Clone repos?

Comment

Pod system

Yes

You can clone the tutorials and examples repos in any location.

Graphcloud

Yes

You can clone the tutorials and examples repos in any location.

Gcore Cloud

No

The tutorials and examples have already been cloned in ~/graphcore/tutorials and ~/graphcore/examples respectively.

If you don’t need to clone the examples repository, then go straight to Section 2.2, Define environment variables.

You can clone the examples repository into a location of your choice.

To clone the examples repository for the latest version of the Poplar SDK:

$ cd ~/[base_dir]
$ git clone https://github.com/graphcore/examples.git

where [base_dir] is a location of your choice. This will install the contents of the examples repository under ~/[base_dir]/examples. The tutorials are in ~/[base_dir]/examples/tutorials.

Note

If you are using a version of the Poplar SDK prior to version 3.2, then refer to Section A, Install examples and tutorials for older Poplar SDK versions for how to install examples and tutorials.

2.2. Define environment variables

In order to simplify running the tutorials, we define the environment variable POPLAR_TUTORIALS_DIR that points to the location of the cloned tutorials.

$ export POPLAR_TUTORIALS_DIR=~/[base_dir]/examples/tutorials

[base_dir] is the location where you installed the Graphcore tutorials.

We also use the environment variable POPLAR_SDK_ENABLED. This environment variable is defined when Poplar is enabled (Section 3.1, Enable the Poplar SDK) and defines the location of the poplar directory in the SDK directory.