gpu-enabled xgboost with Rstudio Server with Tensorflow-GPU for AWS

[jonthegeek]

We're experimenting with the sweet Rstudio Server with Tensorflow-GPU for AWS AMI. It's look great on the tensorflow front, but we want to get GPU-enabled xgboost onto that instance, too, for some related tasks.

I'm trying to follow these instructions, but first it couldn't find CUDACXX (fixed(?) with this), and then I got this:

CMakeFiles/Makefile2:369: recipe for target 'src/CMakeFiles/objxgboost.dir/all' failed
make[1]: *** [src/CMakeFiles/objxgboost.dir/all] Error 2
Makefile:129: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2

Scrolling up, I see a bunch of errors along these lines:

[my home dir]/xgboost/src/data/simple_csr_source.cu(78): error: 
identifier "xgboost::common::CheckNAN" is undefined in device code

Error limit reached.
100 errors detected in the compilation of "/tmp/tmpxft_0000401c_00000000-11_simple_csr_source.compute_70.cpp1.ii".

Any tips? I was hoping using this AMI would mean I don't have to learn out how to solve these sorts of things, but it looks like we might need to solve them after all

[jforest]

@jonthegeek I was able to get GPU-enabled xgboost installed using the following procedure:

Your user needs to have /usr/local/cuda/bin in your $PATH so it can find CUDACXX. (The default ubuntu user has this set automatically)

Steps I used to successfully build/install:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
cd xgboost
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON -DR_LIB=ON
sudo make install -j

Note: I had to use sudo to install as root, as the /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/ directory is owned by root. Otherwise I got this error Error: ERROR: no permission to install to directory ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’

I was then able to load xgboost:

jforest@ip-172-16-133-203:~/xgboost/build$ which R
/usr/bin/R
jforest@ip-172-16-133-203:~/xgboost/build$ R

R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05) -- "Action of the Toes"
Copyright (C) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

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> require(xgboost)
Loading required package: xgboost
>

I hope this provides enough for you to get it working, please let me know if not!