/ROCm

ROCm - Radeon Open Compute Platform

Are You Ready to ROCK!

The ROCm Platform delivers on the vision of the Boltzmann Initiative, bringing new opportunities in GPU Computing Research.

On November 16th, 2015, the Radeon Technology Group rolled out Boltzmann Initiative with three core foundation elements:

  • New Linux(R) Driver and Runtime Stack optimized for HPC & Ultra-scale class computing,
  • Heterogeneous C and C++ compiler which best address the whole system not just a single device
  • HIP acknowledging the need for platform choice when utilizing GPU computing API

Using our knowledge of the HSA Standards and, more importantly, the HSA 1.1 Runtime we have been able to successfully extended support to the dGPU with critical features for NUMA class acceleration. As a result, the ROCK driver is composed of several components based on our efforts to develop the Heterogeneous System Architecture for APUs, including the new AMDGPU driver, the Kernel Fusion Driver (KFD), the HSA+ Runtime and an LLVM based compilation stack for the building of key language support. This support starts with AMD’s FIJI Family of dGPU, but support is planned to expand to include future ASICS.

The Latest ROCm Platform - ROCm 1.1

The latest tested version of the drivers, tools, libraries and source code for the ROCm platform have been released and are available under the roc-1.1.0 tag of the following GitHub repositories:

In addition the following mirror repositories that support the HCC compiler are also available on GitHub, and frozen for the roc-1.1.0 release:

Installing from AMD ROCm Repositories

AMD is hosting both debian and rpm repositories for the ROCm 1.1 packages. The packages in both repositories have been signed to ensure package integrity. Directions for each repository are given below:

Supported Operating Systems

The ROCm platform has been tested on the following operating systems:

  • Ubuntu 14.04.04
  • Fedora 23

There is experimental support for the following operating systems:

  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • Fedora 22

Debian repository - apt-get

Add the ROCm apt repository

For Debian based systems, like Ubuntu, configure the Debian ROCm repository as follows:

wget -qO - http://packages.amd.com/rocm/apt/debian/rocm.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo deb [arch=amd64] http://packages.amd.com/rocm/apt/debian/ trusty main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list'
Install or Update

Next, update the apt-get repository list and install/update the rocm package:

Warning: Before proceeding, make sure to completely uninstall any pre-release ROCm packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rocm

Then, make the ROCm kernel your default kernel. If using grub2 as your bootloader, you can edit the GRUB_DEFAULT variable in the following file:

sudo vi /etc/default/grub
sudo update-grub

Once complete, reboot your system.

We recommend you verify your installation to make sure everything completed successfully.

Un-install

To un-install the entire rocm-dev development package execute:

sudo apt-get autoremove rocm
Installing development packages for cross compilation

It is often useful to develop and test on different systems. In this scenario, you may prefer to avoid installing the ROCm Kernel to your development system.

In this case, install the development subset of packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rocm-dev

Note: To execute ROCm enabled apps you will require a system with the full ROCm driver stack installed

Removing pre-release packages

If you installed any of the ROCm pre-release packages from github, they will need to be manually un-installed:

sudo apt-get purge libhsakmt
sudo apt-get purge radeon-firmware
sudo apt-get purge $(dpkg -l | grep 'kfd\|rocm' | grep linux | grep -v libc | awk '{print $2}')

If possible, we would recommend starting with a fresh OS install.

RPM repository - dnf (yum)

A dnf (yum) repostiory is also available for installation of rpm packages. To configure a system to use the ROCm rpm directory create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/rocm.repo with the following contents:

[remote]

name=ROCm Repo

baseurl=http://packages.amd.com/rocm/yum/rpm/

enabled=1

gpgcheck=0

Execute the following commands:

sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf install rocm

As with the debian packages, it is possible to install rocm-dev or rocm-kernel individually. To uninstall the packages execute:

sudo dnf remove rocm

Verify Installation

To verify that the ROCm stack completed successfully you can execute to HSA vectory_copy sample application:

cd /opt/rocm/hsa/sample
make
./vector_copy

Closed Source Components

The ROCm platform relies on a few closed source components to provide legacy functionality like HSAIL finalization and debugging/profiling support. These components are only available through the ROCm repositories, and will either be deprecated or become open source components in the future. These components are made available in the following packages:

  • hsa-ext-rocr-dev

Getting ROCm Source Code

Modifications can be made to the ROCm 1.1 components by modifying the open source code base and rebuilding the components. Source code can be cloned from each of the GitHub repositories using git, or users can use the repo command and the ROCm 1.1 manifest file to download the entire ROCm 1.1 source code.

Installing repo

Google's repo tool allows you to manage multiple git repositories simultaneously. You can install it by executing the following commands:

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

Note: make sure ~/bin exists and it is part of your PATH

Cloning the code

mkdir ROCm && cd ROCm
repo init -u https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm.git -b roc-1.1.0
repo sync

These series of commands will pull all of the open source code associated with the ROCm 1.1 release.