Ascend AI Operator Development Toolchain Learning Environment Installation Guide¶

[!CAUTION]Note
Disclaimer
This document and related scripts are for learning purposes only. No guarantee is made regarding stability and security in production environments. Users must assess risks and assume corresponding responsibilities on their own.

1. Operator Tool Learning Environment Installation¶

You need to prepare a Linux server equipped with at least one Ascend NPU card, with the NPU driver and firmware already installed.

1.1 Operator Tool Installation¶

The operator tool is integrated and released with CANN, and the following two installation methods are provided:

Containerized Runtime Environment: Recommended method. It can be completed within 5 minutes when the Docker service is running normally. Please refer to the CANN Container Environment Setup Guide for installation.
Bare Metal or Virtual Machine Environment: Installation is complex and time-consuming. Multi-user sharing can easily lead to conflicts and potentially difficult-to-resolve environmental issues. If you must use this type of environment, please refer to the CANN Official Installation Guide for installation. Using a relatively newer version is sufficient.

1.2 Workspace Directory Initialization¶

1. Creating Workspace
Create the workspace directory to store various files generated during example execution. The path is ~/ot_demo/workspace (where "ot" is the acronym for Operator Tool):

mkdir -p ~/ot_demo/workspace

2. Downloading Repository
Download to the ~/ot_demo directory. After downloading, the example path is ~/ot_demo/msot/example:

git clone https://gitcode.com/Ascend/msot.git ~/ot_demo/msot

Tip: If the git download fails in your environment, you can directly download the compressed package from gitcode.com and manually transfer it to the server, ensuring the directory structure remains correct.

1.3 Obtaining the Chip SoC Model¶

Since the chip SoC model is frequently used in many subsequent commands and the method to obtain it is relatively complex, it is obtained uniformly here and stored in the environment variable MY_STUDY_VAR_CHIP_SOC_TYPE for easy reference later.

[!CAUTION] Note
The environment variable MY_STUDY_VAR_CHIP_SOC_TYPE is only used for this quick start tutorial. Do not use this variable in commercial development.

1.3.1 Automatically Obtaining the Chip SoC Model¶

If you want to quickly experience the tool, run the following command to automatically obtain and set the chip SoC model:

python3 ~/ot_demo/msot/example/quick_start/public/get_ai_soc_version.py

If the execution is successful, run the following as prompted:

source set_chip_env_var.sh

This script writes the chip SoC model (with the "Ascend" prefix removed, e.g., 910B4, 910_9392) into the environment variable MY_STUDY_VAR_CHIP_SOC_TYPE.

1.3.2 Manually Obtaining the Chip SoC Model¶

If you want to learn about the concept and acquisition method of the chip SoC model, please refer to Ascend Chip SoC Model Acquisition Method to manually obtain the chip SoC model, and replace <YOUR_CHIP_NAME> in the following command with the value after removing the "Ascend" prefix (e.g., 910B4), then execute:

echo "export MY_STUDY_VAR_CHIP_SOC_TYPE=<YOUR_CHIP_NAME>" >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

[!CAUTION]Note
The value of MY_STUDY_VAR_CHIP_SOC_TYPE is the value after removing the Ascend prefix:
Correct values: 910B4, 910_9392;
Incorrect values: Ascend910B4, Ascend910_9392.

1.4 Installing Python Libraries¶

The operator project build depends on the following libraries. Please execute the following command to install them:

pip3 install -r ~/ot_demo/msot/example/quick_start/public/requirements.txt -i https://mirrors.aliyun.com/pypi/simple/
ln -sf /usr/local/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python3

[!NOTE] Note
Due to the slow download speed from the official website, the above command uses the Alibaba source for installation. If your environment cannot access the Alibaba source, or if you do not trust this source for security reasons, you can remove the -i xxx parameter to restore the default source.