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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

SmartSim and SmartRedis

SmartSim is an open-source tool developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) designed to facilitate the integration of traditional HPC simulation applications with machine learning workflows. There are two core components to SmartSim:

  • Infrastructure Library (IL)
  • Provides an API to start, stop, and monitor HPC applications from Python
  • Interfaces with the PBSpro scheduler to launch jobs
  • Deploys a distributed in-memory database called the Orchestrator
  • SmartRedis Client Library
  • Provides clients that connect to the Orchestrator from Fortran, C, C++, and Python code
  • The client API library enables data transfer to/from the database and the ability to load and run JIT-traced Python and ML runtimes acting on stored data

For more resources on SmartSim, follow the links below:

Installation

Create a Python virtual environment based on the ML frameworks module:

module load frameworks/2024.2.1_u1
python -m venv --clear /path/to/_ssim_env --system-site-packages
source /path/to/_ssim_env/bin/activate

It is recommended that the venv is installed in a user's project space on the Flare parallel file system.

Install SmartSim:

git clone https://github.com/rickybalin/SmartSim.git
cd SmartSim
git checkout rollback_aurora
pip install -e .
cd ..

Install the RedisAI PyTorch backend for the CPU:

export TORCH_CMAKE_PATH=$( python -c 'import torch;print(torch.utils.cmake_prefix_path)' )
export TORCH_PATH=$( python -c 'import torch; print(torch.__path__[0])' )
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$TORCH_PATH/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
smart build -v --device cpu --torch_dir $TORCH_CMAKE_PATH --no_tf
smart validate --device cpu

Install the SmartRedis library:

git clone https://github.com/rickybalin/SmartRedis.git
cd SmartRedis
pip install -e .
make lib
cd ..

Known Issues:

  • Pip installing SmartSim returns some warnings which can be safely ignored.
  • The smart build -v --device cpu command builds the RedisAI backend for the CPU. This enables ML model inferencing on the CPU with SmartSim and SmartRedis. Due to a limitation with RedisAI, the backend cannot be built for the Intel Max 1550 GPU.
  • The RedisAI backend requires an older version of TensorFlow relative to what is loaded with the frameworks module on Aurora. If you need the TensorFlow backend, please contact us at [email protected].
  • When running a workload with SmartSim, please include the following in your run or submit scripts:
export TORCH_PATH=$( python -c 'import torch; print(torch.__path__[0])' )
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$TORCH_PATH/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH