Tensorflow Compile Runs For A Long Time

Question

So I am trying to compile TensorFlow from the source (using a clone from their git repo from 2019-01-31). I installed Bazel from their shell script (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/download/0.21.0/bazel-0.21.0-installer-linux-x86_64.sh).

I executed ./configure in the tensorflow code and provided the default settings except for adding my machine specific -m options (-mavx2 -mfma) and pointing python to the correct python3 location (/usr/bin/py3). I then ran the following command as per the tensorflow instructions:

bazel build --config=opt //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package //tensorflow:libtensorflow_framework.so //tensorflow:libtensorflow.so

Now that continues to run and run, I haven't seen it complete yet (though I am limited to letting it run for a maximum of about 10 hours). It produces a ton of INFO: warnings regarding signed and unsigned integers and control reaching the end of non-void functions. None of these appear fatal. Compilation continues to tick with the two numbers continuing to grow ('[N,NNN / X,XXX] 4 actions running') and files ticking through 'Compiling'.

The machine is an EC2 instance with ~16GiB of RAM, CPU is 'Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30GHz' with I believe 4-cores, plenty of HDD space (although compilation seems to eat QUITE a bit, > 1GiB)

Any ideas on what's going on here?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, some programs can take a long time to compile. A couple of hours of compilation is not strange for tensorflow on your setup.

There are reports of it taking 50 minutes on a considerably faster machine

A solution to this problem is to use pre-compiled binaries that are available with pip, instructions can be found here: https://www.tensorflow.org/install/pip.html

Basically you can do this:

pip install tensorflow

If you require a specific older version, like 1.15, you can do this:

pip install tensorflow==1.15

For gpu support you add -gpu to the package name, like this:

pip install tensorflow-gpu

And:

pip install tensorflow-gpu==1.15