Upgrading PowerAI

Starting with release 1.6.0, PowerAI components are provided as Conda packages rather than OS distribution packages (in other words, rpm files). Because of this, there is no direct upgrade path from previous releases of PowerAI to 1.6.0.

Also starting with release 1.6.0, some NVIDIA components (CUDA Toolkit, cuDNN, and NCCL) are provided as Conda packages to accompany PowerAI. Those NVIDIA components previously had to be installed system wide, but are now installed into individual Conda environments. PowerAI 1.6.0 is built for CUDA 10.1, and requires version 418 of NVIDIA's GPU driver. The GPU driver is not provided as a conda package and must be installed separately.

To upgrade, you must do the following actions:

  1. Uninstall the previous version of PowerAI
  2. Uninstall the previous version of CUDA and the GPU driver
  3. Install CUDA and the GPU driver
  4. Install current release of PowerAI

Upgrading from PowerAI 1.5.0 Caffe

The Caffe packages in PowerAI 1.5.0 created symlinks to the HDF5 library in a cache directory. After upgrading to the latest version of PowerAI, it is safe to remove the library symlinks from the cache directory:

ls -l ~/.powerai/caffe-bvlc/
rm -r ~/.powerai/caffe-bvlc

ls -l ~/.powerai/caffe-ibm/
rm -r ~/.powerai/caffe-ibm