Installing faiss on Google Colaboratory

Question

I try to follow instruction on the MUSE project.

They require PyTorch and Faiss. PyTorch is easy to install. But I found problem with installing Faiss.

The instruction on MUSE tell me to use

conda install faiss-cpu -c pytorch

But Google Colab doesn't support conda (When I tried !pip install conda, it didn't work)

And Faiss didn't work when I !pip install faiss either.

Is there a way to install Faiss or conda?

Answer 1

Here's how I eventually install faiss.

!wget  https://anaconda.org/pytorch/faiss-cpu/1.2.1/download/linux-64/faiss-cpu-1.2.1-py36_cuda9.0.176_1.tar.bz2
!tar xvjf faiss-cpu-1.2.1-py36_cuda9.0.176_1.tar.bz2
!cp -r lib/python3.6/site-packages/* /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/
!pip install mkl

Then, I can import faiss with no problem. The warning is that I didn't use GPU. If you want to use GPU, you need to install this instead:

https://anaconda.org/pytorch/faiss-gpu/1.2.1/download/linux-64/faiss-gpu-1.2.1-py36_cuda9.0.176_1.tar.bz2

Update June 2020

As @Kuffner said, you can now use !pip to install it. (I test and simplify it a bit)

For CPU

!apt install libomp-dev
!pip install faiss

For GPU

!pip install faiss-gpu