Category Archives: Operating Systems

Command Cheatsheet: Checking Versions of Installed Software / Libraries / Tools for Deep Learning on Ubuntu 16.04

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In the previous posts, we’ve walked through the installations and configurations for various components and libraries required for doing deep learning / artificial intelligence on a Ubuntu 16.04 box. The next step is to be productive, crunching codes and solving problems by applying various algorithms. At this stage, visits to StackOverflow, Github or other similar sites become more frequent. And here is when the problem may arise. Not all codes or snippets copied and pasted from such online references can immediately work. One of the reasons is that the code was indeed written for same software, library, or tool but at different version.

Interestingly, software components for machine learning present different way to obtain the versions. These variations can sometimes result in additional time spent to query “ubuntu get xyz version” on the search engine. This is okay for one component, but when the system becomes complex enough (for example machine learning meets big data for ETL), this can turn into a productivity killer due to unjustifiable time taken for navigating the search engine.

Why not build a list for that?

This post summarizes the shell commands used for obtaining the versions of machine learning-related software and libraries. Commands are embodied in categories that reflect the logical / functional unit the software component belongs to. Continue reading →

ReactJS: Changing Default Port 3000 in create-react-app

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Last update: January 15, 2022

If you are doing frontend development nowadays, you may have heard about ReactJS or may be actively using it in your projects. Introduced to the public five years ago, React has transformed into a library of choice for a lot of frontend developers that is easily certified by the enormous stars at its Github page (more than 100,000 stars). React was relicensed into MIT license almost a year ago, which only catapulted its popularity into a new high. The MIT license is a more commercial friendly license compared to the BSD + patents license that was previously used by React.

Creating a frontend project is easy with the help of scaffolding tools and boilerplates. Among the available choices is create-react-app, a React bootstrapping utility that takes care the laborious tasks of setting up a React project without much intervention about how the project should be structured. Given this nature, create-react-app is less assumed a boilerplate and more of a toolkit. Continue reading →

How to Install Jupyter Notebook as Service for Tensor Flow and Deep Learning on Ubuntu 16.04

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When developing a deep-learning system, especially during the modeling stage, a lot of trials and errors can be involved in evolving the codebase. The easy remedy to reduce errors will be by using a robust IDE that provides productivity-boosting features such as code completion, method definition, codestyle suggestion, advanced debugging, user-friendly UI, and so forth.

Another element for better development experience is interactivity. Instead of writing the whole source code and evaluate everything, it is arguably more productive to write the code in small steps, with one line as the smallest unit, and evaluate the code up to the last line written. This kind of mechanism is possible for scripting language where the codes are interpreted. Node JS for example has a feature named Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) that enables someone to write Javascript code with Node JS and has it evaluated on the go. Deep learning algorithms and systems are often developed in Python, another interpreted language. Similar initiative also exists for Python in the forms of interactive shell and “notebook”. A notebook is an interactive environment, normally with web GUI support, where someone can combine code execution, text, rich media, charting and other types of data visualization. A popular notebook for Python is Jupyter Notebook, which was formerly known as IPython Notebook.

In this article, we will go into more details about Jupyter Notebook installation and configuration on Ubuntu 16.04. However, it’s important to note that the configuration depends on some pre-requisites. This article is the continuation of the previous article about TensorFlow installation. Please make sure you have read the article to understand the pre-requisites, otherwise some steps explained in this article may not work. Continue reading →

Guide: Installing Tensor Flow 1.8 with GPU Support against CUDA 9.1 and cuDNN 7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04

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What is interesting in the deep learning ecosystem is the plentiful choices of deep learning frameworks. On the other side, of course there is another equation; more options equate to more confusion, especially in choosing the most appropriate framework for the entire gamut of the problems. At the end of the day, instead of using one, we may need to stick with multiple deep learning frameworks with each usage depending on the nature of the problem to solve.

TensorFlow is one of the popular (de facto most popular in terms of Github stars) deep learning frameworks. TensorFlow comes with excellent documentation. This also includes the documentation for installation. If you go to the official documentation page for installation, you will be provided with elaborate installation guide for multiple OS platforms. Then why this post?

The latest version of TensorFlow with GPU support (version 1.8 at the time this post is published) is built against CUDA 9.0. However, NVIDIA has released CUDA 9.1 and there is possibility of newer version release in the near future. Given that TensorFlow is lagging behind the CUDA GA version, the publicly released TensorFlow bundle cannot immediately work on the system having only the latest CUDA version installed. A remedy for this is by installing from source, which can be non-trivial especially for those who are not so familiar with the source build mechanism.

The final system setup after completing the installation steps explained in the posts will be as follows.

ItemValue
OSUbuntu 16.04
NVIDIA driver version390.48
CUDA version9.1
cuDNN version7.1.3
NCCL version2.1.15
Python version2.7.12
Python install methodvirtualenv
TensorFlow version1.8.0

Note that the components will be updated in the future. This implies version upgrade for the components. It is expected that this post will still be valid even after version upgrade. Under the circumstances where this post becomes invalid, the content will be updated or another post will be written. Yet, this would be realized with sufficient comments or feedback regarding existing content. Continue reading →

How to Install NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL) 2 for TensorFlow on Ubuntu 16.04

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NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL) is a library developed to provide parallel computation primitives on multi-GPU and multi-node environment. The idea is to enable GPUs to collectively work to complete certain computing task. This is especially helpful when the computation is complex. With multiple GPUs working together, the task will be completed in less time, rendering a more performing system. People with background or experience in distributed system, such as Hadoop, may immediately relate this concept with similar model applied in the traditional distributed system. Hadoop, for example, supports MapReduce programming model that splits a compute job into chunks that are spread into the slave nodes and collected back by the master to produce the final output. Continue reading →