Clients

There are two client executables that can be used with hipBLAS. They are,

1. hipblas-bench

2. hipblas-test

These two clients can be built by following the instructions in the Building and Installing hipBLAS github page . After building the hipBLAS clients, they can be found in the directory hipBLAS/build/release/clients/staging.

The next two sections will cover a brief explanation and the usage of each hipBLAS client.

hipblas-bench

hipblas-bench is used to measure performance and to verify the correctness of hipBLAS functions.

It has a command line interface. For more information:

./hipblas-bench --help

For example, to measure performance of sgemm:

./hipblas-bench -f gemm -r f32_r --transposeA N --transposeB N -m 4096 -n 4096 -k 4096 --alpha 1 --lda 4096 --ldb 4096 --beta 0 --ldc 4096

On a vega20 machine the above command outputs a performance of 11941.5 Gflops below:

transA,transB,M,N,K,alpha,lda,ldb,beta,ldc,hipblas-Gflops,us
N,N,4096,4096,4096,1,4096,4096,0,4096,11941.5,11509.4

A useful way of finding the parameters that can be used with ./hipblas-bench -f gemm is to turn on logging by setting environment variable ROCBLAS_LAYER=2. For example if the user runs:

ROCBLAS_LAYER=2 ./hipblas-bench -f gemm -i 1 -j 0

The above command will log:

./rocblas-bench -f gemm -r f32_r --transposeA N --transposeB N -m 128 -n 128 -k 128 --alpha 1 --lda 128 --ldb 128 --beta 0 --ldc 128

The user can copy and change the above command. For example, to change the datatype to IEEE-64 bit and the size to 2048:

./hipblas-bench -f gemm -r f64_r --transposeA N --transposeB N -m 2048 -n 2048 -k 2048 --alpha 1 --lda 2048 --ldb 2048 --beta 0 --ldc 2048

Logging affects performance, so only use it to log the command to copy and change, then run the command without logging to measure performance.

Note that hipblas-bench also has the flag -v 1 for correctness checks.

hipblas-test

hipblas-test is used in performing hipBLAS unit tests and it uses Googletest framework.

To run the hipblas tests:

./hipblas-test