Contribution

Contributing to Intel® Extension for PyTorch*

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Intel® Extension for PyTorch*. Before you begin writing code, it is important that you share your intention to contribute with the team, based on the type of contribution:

  1. You want to propose a new feature and implement it.

    • Post about your intended feature in a GitHub issue, and we shall discuss the design and implementation. Once we agree that the plan looks good, go ahead and implement it.

  2. You want to implement a feature or bug-fix for an outstanding issue.

    • Search for your issue in the GitHub issue list.

    • Pick an issue and comment that you’d like to work on the feature or bug-fix.

    • If you need more context on a particular issue, ask and we shall provide.

Once you implement and test your feature or bug-fix, submit a Pull Request to https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch.

Developing Intel® Extension for PyTorch* on XPU

A full set of instructions on installing Intel® Extension for PyTorch* from source is in the Installation document.

To develop on your machine, here are some tips:

  1. Uninstall all existing Intel® Extension for PyTorch* installs. You may need to run pip uninstall intel_extension_for_pytorch multiple times. You’ll know intel_extension_for_pytorch is fully uninstalled when you see WARNING: Skipping intel_extension_for_pytorch as it is not installed. (You should only have to pip uninstall a few times, but you can always uninstall with timeout or in a loop.)

    yes | pip uninstall intel_extension_for_pytorch
    
  2. Clone a copy of Intel® Extension for PyTorch* from source:

    git clone https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch.git -b xpu-master
    cd intel-extension-for-pytorch
    

    If you already have Intel® Extension for PyTorch* from source, update it:

    git pull --rebase
    git submodule sync --recursive
    git submodule update --init --recursive --jobs 0
    
  3. Install Intel® Extension for PyTorch* in develop mode:

    Replace:

    python setup.py install
    

    with:

    python setup.py develop
    

    This mode will symlink the Python files from the current local source tree into the Python install. After that, if you modify a Python file, you do not need to reinstall Intel® Extension for PyTorch* again. This is especially useful if you are only changing Python files.

    For example:

    • Install local Intel® Extension for PyTorch* in develop mode

    • modify your Python file intel_extension_for_pytorch/__init__.py (for example)

    • test functionality

You do not need to repeatedly install after modifying Python files (.py). However, you would need to reinstall if you modify a Python interface (.pyi, .pyi.in) or non-Python files (.cpp, .h, etc.).

If you want to reinstall, make sure that you uninstall Intel® Extension for PyTorch* first by running pip uninstall intel_extension_for_pytorch until you see WARNING: Skipping intel_extension_for_pytorch as it is not installed. Then run python setup.py clean. After that, you can install in develop mode again.

Tips and Debugging

  • Our setup.py requires Python >= 3.6

  • If you run into errors when running python setup.py develop, here are some debugging steps:

    1. Remove your build directory. The setup.py script compiles binaries into the build folder and caches many details along the way. This saves time the next time you build. If you’re running into issues, you can always rm -rf build from the toplevel directory and start over.

    2. If you have made edits to the Intel® Extension for PyTorch* repo, commit any change you’d like to keep and clean the repo with the following commands (note that clean really removes all untracked files and changes.):

      git submodule deinit -f .
      git clean -xdf
      python setup.py clean
      git submodule update --init --recursive --jobs 0 # very important to sync the submodules
      python setup.py develop                          # then try running the command again
      
    3. The main step within python setup.py develop is running make from the build directory. If you want to experiment with some environment variables, you can pass them into the command:

      ENV_KEY1=ENV_VAL1[, ENV_KEY2=ENV_VAL2]* python setup.py develop
      

Unit testing

All Python test suites are located in the tests/gpu folder and start with test_. Run individual test suites using the command python tests/gpu/${Sub_Folder}/FILENAME.py, where FILENAME represents the file containing the test suite you wish to run and ${Sub_Folder} is one of the following folders:

  • examples: unit tests created during op development

  • experimental: ported test suites from Stock PyTorch 1.10

  • regression: unit tests created during bug fix to avoid future regression

Better local unit tests with pytest

We don’t officially support pytest, but it works well with our unit tests and offers a number of useful features for local developing. Install it via pip install pytest.

For more information about unit tests, please read README.md in the tests/gpu folder.

Writing documentation

Do you want to write some documentation for your code contribution and don’t know where to start?

Intel® Extension for PyTorch* uses Google style for formatting docstrings. Length of line inside docstrings block must be limited to 80 characters to fit into Jupyter documentation popups.

Building documentation

To build the documentation:

  1. Build and install Intel® Extension for PyTorch* (as discussed above)

  2. Install the prerequisites:

    cd docs
    pip install -r requirements.txt
    
  3. Generate the documentation HTML files. The generated files will be in docs/_build/html.

    make clean
    make html
    

Tips

The .rst source files live in docs/tutorials folder. Some of the .rst files pull in docstrings from Intel® Extension for PyTorch* Python code (for example, via the autofunction or autoclass directives). To shorten doc build times, it is helpful to remove the files you are not working on, only keeping the base index.rst file and the files you are editing. The Sphinx build will produce missing file warnings but will still complete.