Source (GitHub) | Download notebook

4.3. Data Parallelism in PopXL

This tutorial on data parallelism in PopXL is available as a Jupyter notebook.

To run the notebook in this folder:

  1. Install a Poplar SDK (version 2.6 or later) and source the enable.sh scripts for both PopART and Poplar as described in the Getting Started guide for your IPU system.

  2. Install system dependencies: apt-get install -y $(< required_apt_packages.txt)

  3. Create a Python virtual environment: python3 -m venv <virtual_env>.

  4. Activate the virtual environment: . <virtual_env>/bin/activate.

  5. Update pip: pip3 install --upgrade pip

  6. Install requirements pip3 install -r requirements.txt (this will also install popxl.addons).

  7. Launch a Jupyter Server on a specific port: jupyter-notebook --no-browser --port <port number>. Be sure to be in the virtual environment.

  8. Connect via SSH to your remote machine, forwarding your chosen port: ssh -NL <port number>:localhost:<port number> <your username>@<remote machine>

On the machine connected to IPUs:

python3 -m venv virtual_env
. virtual_env/bin/activate
pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
pip3 install jupyter
jupyter-notebook --no-browser --port 12345

Take note of the URL displayed by the jupyter-notebook command.

On your local machine:

ssh -NL 12345:localhost:12345 <your username>@<remote machine>

Then navigate in your web-browser to the URL displayed by Jupyter in the previous step.

For more details about this process, or if you need troubleshooting, see our guide on using IPUs from Jupyter notebooks.