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Getting Started

This document provides quick-start instructions for DAPHNE users and DAPHNE developers, which should work in most cases. Furthermore, it contains background information to help with custom setups.

Quickstart for Users

Follow these instructions if you want to use DAPHNE to define and run your own integrated data analysis pipelines. These simple steps should suffice to get started for most users. If required, you can find more details for custom setups later in this document.

1. Get DAPHNE

Option 1: Use a binary release

Download and extract the file daphne-<flavor>-<version>-bin.tgz from the release page. It is recommended to use the latest version and to choose the flavor based on your platform and needs (e.g., X86-64, cuda-X86-64, or ARMV8). Using DAPHNE with CUDA requires Nvidia Pascal hardware or newer.

Option 2: Build from sources

To build from the latest sources with the most up-to-date state of DAPHNE, please follow the Quickstart for Developers below. If you want to use a source release, also follow those instructions, but instead of cloning the DAPHNE repository, download the source code of the latest release (file <version>.zip) from the release page. After the build, you can simply use the system without making changes to the source code.

2. Run DAPHNE

Ubuntu. The DAPHNE release binaries should run natively on recent Ubuntu systems (20.04 or later) and perhaps on other GNU/Linux distributions. However, if there are any issues running DAPHNE natively, please try the pre-built DAPHNE container image.

Windows. The container image can also be used in Windows and WSL. Installing WSL and Docker should be straightforward using the documentation provided by Microsoft. On an installed WSL container, launching DAPHNE via Docker should work the same way as in a native installation.

The following commands should be executed in a bash (or a compatible shell) from the extracted binary release directory (e.g., daphne-X86-64-v<version>-bin).

Option 1: Run DAPHNE in the Container

Download the container image 

docker pull daphneeu/daphne:latest_X86-64_BASE
Hint: In case of Docker permission errors, consider prepending sudo to the command.

Hint: You may want to choose another image tag based on your platform and needs, e.g., latest_X86-64_CUDA (for GPU support) or latest_ARMV8_BASE (for ARM support).

Run a DaphneDSL hello-world script in the container, which should print the following (besides some numbers): 

containers/quickstart.sh scripts/examples/hello-world.daph

Hello World!

Option 2: Run DAPHNE Natively

Run a DaphneDSL hello-world script natively, which should print the following (besides some numbers):

./run-daphne.sh scripts/examples/hello-world.daph

Hello World!

Hint: Run with --cuda to activate CUDA ops, see also ./run-daphne.sh --help.

Run a DaphneLib example natively, which should print something like the following (the concrete numbers are random):

./run-python.sh scripts/examples/daphnelib/shift-and-scale.py

[[ 0.60676254 -0.88097088 -0.33785961]
 [-0.48030447 -1.04911355  0.97716037]
 [ 1.44938037  1.31980374 -0.2036432 ]
 [-0.060317   -0.46788873 -1.59526103]
 [-1.51552144  1.07816942  1.15960347]]

Hint: DaphneLib requires numpy and pandas, consider installing them in a virtual environment.

Next Steps

Quickstart for Developers

Follow these instructions if you want to make modifications to DAPHNE in terms of the source code, tests, examples, tooling, or documentation. These simple steps should suffice to get started for most developers. If required, you can find more details for custom setups later in this document.

1. Clone the DAPHNE Source Code Repository

Clone the source code of the main DAPHNE repository (command below) or your own fork (adapt the command below as necessary).

git clone https://github.com/daphne-eu/daphne.git

2. Download the DAPHNE Development Container Image

The development container image already contains all necessary dependencies of a DAPHNE development environment as well as a useful initialization of environment variables etc., such that you don't need to worry about these things and can have a productive start.

Get the container image

docker pull daphneeu/daphne-dev:latest_X86-64_BASE
Hint: In case of Docker permission errors, try prepending sudo to the command.

Hint: You may want to choose another image tag based on your platform and needs, e.g., latest_X86-64_CUDA (for GPU support) or latest_ARMV8_BASE (for ARM support).

Enter the container, which should finally print something like the following (where xyz is your user name on your system, and the password and IP address may vary):

cd daphne
./containers/run-docker-example.sh

Use xyz with password Docker!0147 for SSH login
Docker Container IP address(es):
172.17.0.2
xyz@daphne-container:/daphne$

Hint: In case of Docker permission errors, consider setting USE_SUDO=sudo in run-docker-example.sh near line 26.

Hint: If you pulled a container image of another tag above (e.g., latest_X86-64_CUDA), set DOCKER_TAG= accordingly in run-docker-example.sh near line 22.

Hint: You can leave the container at any time by executing exit or by typing [Ctrl]+[D].

3. Build DAPHNE and Run the Test Suite

Everything related to building and running DAPHNE should be done inside the DAPHNE development container, as described above.

Build DAPHNE, which should finally print something like the following: 

./build.sh --no-deps --target all

[DAPHNE]..Successfully built Daphne://all

Run the test suite, which should finally print something like the following (the concrete numbers of assertions and test cases may have changed since the time of this writing): 

./test.sh -nb -d yes

===============================================================================
All tests passed (307532 assertions in 1186 test cases)

Run a hello-world script, which should print the following: 

bin/daphne scripts/examples/hello-world.daph

Hello World!

Next Steps

Additional Details for Custom Setups

The Quickstart for Users and Quickstart for Developers above should be enough for most users and developers to get started. Nevertheless, there are cases when more details are required, e.g., when DAPHNE shall be run natively, without one of the pre-built containers.

System Requirements

Please ensure that your development system meets the following requirements before trying to build DAPHNE. Note that the DAPHNE container images already ship with all these dependencies installed. There is a convenience script to install all necessary dependencies to compile DAPHNE on Ubuntu distributions. However, in order to use optional features, such as CUDA or FPGA support, the respective requirements listed below still need to be installed separately.

(*) You can view the version numbers as an orientation rather than a strict requirement. Newer versions should work as well, older versions might work as well.

Operating system

OS distribution/version known to work (*) Comment
GNU/Linux Manjaro Last checked in April 2024
GNU/Linux Ubuntu 20.04 - 24.04 All versions in that range work. 20.04 needs CMake installed from Snap.
GNU/Linux Ubuntu 18.04 Used with Intel PAC D5005 FPGA, custom toolchain needed
GNU/Linux RHEL 8 Custom toolchain needed
MS Windows 10 Build 19041, 11 Works on Ubuntu WSL2, using the provided Docker images is recommended
Windows

Installing WSL and Docker should be straightforward using the documentation provided by Microsoft. On an installed WSL container, launching DAPHNE via Docker (see below) should work the same way as in a native installation.

Software

tool/lib version known to work (*) comment
clang 10.0.0
cmake 3.20 On Ubuntu 20.04, install by sudo snap install cmake --classic to fulfill the version requirement; apt provides only version 3.16.3.
GCC/G++ 9.3.0 Last checked version: 13.2 (compiles with warnings)
gfortran 9.3.0
git 2.25.1
java (e.g. openjdk) 11 (1.7 should be fine)
jq json commandline processor used in docker image generation scripts.
libpfm4-dev 4.10 This dependency is needed for profiling support [DAPHNE-#479]
gRPC 1.38.0
libssl-dev 1.1.1 Dependency introduced while optimizing grpc build (which used to build ssl unnecessarily)
lld 10.0.0
llvm-10-tools 10, 15, 18 apt provides up to llvm-10-tools for Ubuntu 20.04 whereas 22.04 / 24.04 require a newer version such as llvm-15-tools.
ninja 1.10.0
numpy 1.19.5
pandas 0.25.3
pkg-config 0.29.1
python3 3.8.5
unzip 6.0
uuid-dev
wget Used to fetch additional dependencies and other artefacts.
zlib1g-dev Needed to satisfy cmake dependencies.
*** *** ***
CUDA SDK 11.7.1 Optional for CUDA ops
Intel FPGA SDK or OneAPI FPGA Add-On 2022.x Optional for FPGAOPENCL ops
OneAPI SDK 2022.x Optional for OneAPI ops
tensorflow 2.13.1 Optional for data exchange between DaphneLib and TensorFlow
torch 2.3.0+cu121 Optional for data exchange between DaphneLib and PyTorch

Hardware

  • about 7.5 GB of free disk space to build from source (mostly due to dependencies)
  • Optional:
  • NVidia GPU for CUDA ops (tested on Pascal and newer architectures); 8GB for CUDA SDK
  • Intel GPU for OneAPI ops (tested on Coffeelake graphics); 23 GB for OneAPI
  • Intel FPGA for FPGAOPENCL ops (tested on PAC D5005 accelerator); 23 GB for OneAPI

Obtaining the Source Code

The DAPHNE system is based on MLIR, which is a part of the LLVM monorepo. The LLVM monorepo is included in this repository as a submodule. Thus, clone this repository as follows to also clone the submodule:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/daphne-eu/daphne.git

Upstream changes to this repository might contain changes to the submodule (we might have upgraded to a newer version of MLIR/LLVM). Thus, please pull as follows:

# in git >= 2.14
git pull --recurse-submodules

# in git < 2.14
git pull && git submodule update --init --recursive

# or use this little convenience script
./pull.sh

Building the DAPHNE system

Simply build the system using the build-script without any arguments:

./build.sh

When you do this the first time, or when there were updates to the LLVM submodule, this will also download and build the third-party material, which might increase the build time significantly. Subsequent builds, e.g., when you changed something in this repository, will be much faster.

If the build fails in between (e.g., due to missing packages), multiple build directories (e.g., daphne, antlr, llvm) require cleanup. To only remove build output use the following two commands:

./build.sh --clean
./build.sh --cleanDeps

If you want to remove downloaded and extracted artifacts, use this:

./build.sh --cleanCache

For convenience, you can call the following to remove them all.

./build.sh --cleanAll

See this page for more information.

Setting up the environment

As DAPHNE uses shared libraries, these need to be found by the operating system's loader to link them at runtime. Since most DAPHNE setups will not end up in one of the standard directories (e.g., /usr/local/lib), environment variables are a convenient way to set everything up without interfering with system installations (where you might not even have administrative privileges to do so).

# from your cloned DAPHNE repo or your otherwise extracted sources/binaries: 
export DAPHNE_ROOT=$PWD 
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DAPHNE_ROOT/lib:$DAPHNE_ROOT/thirdparty/installed/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
# optionally, you can add the location of the DAPHNE executable to your PATH:
export PATH=$DAPHNE_ROOT/bin:$PATH

If you're running/compiling DAPHNE from a container you'll most probably *not* need to set these environment variables (unless you have reason to customize your setup - then it is assumed that you know what you are doing).

Running the Tests

./test.sh

We use catch2 as the unit test framework. You can use all command line arguments of catch2 with test.sh.

Running DAPHNE

Write a little DaphneDSL script or use scripts/examples/hello-world.daph...

print("Hello World!");

... and execute it as follows: bin/daphne scripts/examples/hello-world.daph (This command works if daphne is run after building from source. Omit bin/ in the path to the DAPHNE binary if executed from the binary distribution).

Optionally flags like --cuda can be added after the daphne command and before the script file to activate support for accelerated ops (see software requirements above and build instructions). For further flags that can be set at runtime to activate additional functionality, run daphne --help.

Building and Running with Containers

To avoid installing dependencies and to circumvent conflicts with existing installed libraries, one may use containers.

  • You need to install Docker or Singularity: Docker version 20.10.2 or higher | Singularity version 3.7.0-1.el7 or higher are sufficient
  • You can use the provided docker files and scripts to create and run DAPHNE.

A full description on containers is available in the containers subdirectory.

The following recreates all images provided by daphneeu

cd containers
./build-containers.sh

Running in an interactive container can be done with this run script, which takes care of mounting your current directory and handling permissions:

# please customize this script first
./containers/run-docker-example.sh

For more about building and running with containers, refer (once again) to the directory containers/ and its README.md. For documentation about using containers in conjunction with our cluster deployment scripts, refer to Deploy.md.

Exploring the Source Code

As an entry point for exploring the source code, you might want to have a look at the code behind the daphne executable, which can be found in src/api/cli/daphne.cpp.

On the top-level, there are the following directories:

  • bin: after compilation, generated binaries will be placed here (e.g., daphne)
  • build: temporary build output
  • containers: scripts and configuration files to get/build/run with Docker or Singularity containers
  • deploy: shell scripts to ease deployment in SLURM clusters
  • doc: documentation written in markdown (e.g., what you are reading at the moment)
  • lib: after compilation, generated library files will be placed here (e.g., libAllKernels.so, libCUDAKernels.so, ...)
  • scripts: a collection of algorithms and examples written in DAPHNE's own domain specific language (DaphneDSL)
  • src: the actual source code, subdivided into the individual components of the system
  • test: test cases
  • thirdparty: required external software