Tutorial
In this tutorial, we show how to get started with Strada and run it with the GPU backend.
Setting up Amazon's GPU instances
These steps are from the Caffe wiki. First, start one of Amazon's GPU instances (g2.2xlarge or g2.8xlarge) using Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit as the AMI. We also recommend to increase the root /dev/sda1
device size to something larger than 8 GiB.
First update the system and install build-essential
:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Next, download the NVIDIA driver
wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/7_0/Prod/local_installers/cuda_7.0.28_linux.run
Extract the installers using
chmod +x cuda_7.0.28_linux.run
mkdir nvidia_installers
./cuda_7.0.28_linux.run -extract=`pwd`/nvidia_installers
Then update the linux image to be compatible with NVIDIA's drivers:
sudo apt-get install linux-image-extra-virtual
While installing the linux-image-extra-virtual, you may be prompted "What would you like to do about menu.lst?". I selected "keep the local version currently installed".
Now we have to disable nouveau since it conflicts with NVIDIA's kernel module. Open
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
and add the following lines to this file:
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off
Back in the shell, execute the commands:
echo options nouveau modeset=0 | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo reboot
After the reboot, we can finally install the driver:
sudo apt-get install linux-source
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
cd nvidia_installers
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.46.run
Just select the defaults for all the questions that pop up.
Now we can install CUDA
sudo modprobe nvidia
sudo ./cuda-linux64-rel-7.0.28-19326674.run
sudo ./cuda-samples-linux-7.0.28-19326674.run
Follow the suggestion to add the following to your .bashrc
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/cuda-7.0/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:/usr/local/cuda-7.0/lib64
and activate it by running source ~/.bashrc
.
Installing Julia and Strada
Install Julia with
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:staticfloat/juliareleases
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:staticfloat/julia-deps
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install julia
To install Strada, call julia
and run
Pkg.clone("https://github.com/pcmoritz/Strada.jl")
Pkg.build("Strada")
Trying out models
First, download the MNIST data set from Yann LeCun's website by running the commands
cd ~/.julia/v0.3/Strada/data/
bash get-mnist.sh
Now you can train the model on the CPU by running
cd ~/.julia/v0.3/Strada/examples
julia train-mnist.jl
To train the models on a GPU, you should open train-mnist.jl
and uncomment the line set_gpu_mode(net)
.