1. Introduction

The Graphcore® Virtual-IPU™ (V-IPU) is a software layer for allocating and configuring Graphcore Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) in IPU-Machine™ and IPU-POD™ systems. The IPU devices are accessed using IPU over fabric (IPUoF) network connectivity, based on 100G RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE).

V-IPU provides a command line interface so you can request IPU resources to be allocated to run Poplar® based machine-learning applications.

This guide will walk you through the steps you need to perform in order to start running applications on an IPU system.

1.1. Scope of the document

This document is intended for users of V-IPU-based data centre clusters.

1.2. Structure of the document

The rest of this document is structured as follows. In Section 2, Concepts and architecture we give a brief overview of the components and architecture of the V-IPU management software. Installation instructions are provided Section 6.3.2, Installation. Section 4, Partitions describes how to allocate IPUs to a “partition” that can then be used to run application code. The following chapters describe how to integrate standard cluster management tools (Section 5, Integration with Slurm and Section 6, Integration with Kubernetes). Finally, a complete command-line reference for the vipu utility is provided in Section 7, Command line reference.