faiss-wheels

faiss python wheel packages.

• faiss

Overview

This repository provides scripts to create wheel packages for the faiss library.

• Builds CPU-only or CUDA-10.0+ compatible wheels.
• Bundles OpenBLAS in Linux/Windows using static linking
• Uses Accelerate framework on macOS
• CUDA runtime and cuBLAS are statically linked

There is also a source package to customize the build process.

Prerequisite

On macOS, install libomp via Homebrew to use the wheel.

brew install libomp

Install

Install CPU-only version:

pip install faiss-cpu

Or, install GPU version in Linux:

pip install faiss-gpu

Note that CUDA toolkit is not required to run the GPU wheel. Only NVIDIA drivers should be installed to use gpu index. One can also install faiss-gpu to run cpu-only methods without a NVIDIA driver. For compatible NVIDIA driver versions, check the developer documentation.

Building source package

If there is a custom built faiss library in the system, build source package for the best performance.

Prerequisite

The source package assumes faiss is already built and installed in the system. Build and install the faiss library first.

cd faiss
cmake -B build . -DFAISS_ENABLE_PYTHON=OFF
make -C build -j8
cd ..

See the official faiss installation instruction for more on how to build and install faiss.

For building sdist, swig 3.0.12 or later needs to be available.

Linux

By default, the following builds and installs the faiss-cpu package.

pip install --no-binary :all: faiss-cpu

The following example shows static linking and CUDA support:

export FAISS_ENABLE_GPU=ON
export FAISS_LDFLAGS='-l:libfaiss.a -l:libopenblas.a -lgfortran -lcudart_static -lcublas_static -lculibos'
pip install --no-binary :all: faiss-gpu

There are a few environment variables to specify build-time options.

• CUDA_HOME: Specifies CUDA install location.
• FAISS_INCLUDE: Header locations of the installed faiss library. Default to /usr/local/include.
• FAISS_LDFLAGS: Linker flags for package build. Default to -l:libfaiss.a -l:libopenblas.a -lgfortran.
• FAISS_OPT_LEVEL: Faiss SIMD optimization, one of generic, sse4, avx2.
• FAISS_ENABLE_GPU: Setting this variable to ON builds faiss-gpu package. Set this variable if faiss is built with GPU support.

Below is an example for faiss built with avx2 option and OpenBLAS backend.

export FAISS_OPT_LEVEL='avx2'
export FAISS_LDFLAGS='-l:libfaiss_avx2.a -l:libopenblas.a -lgfortran'
pip install --no-binary :all: faiss-cpu

macOS

On macOS, install libomp via Homebrew to build with OpenMP support. Mac has Accelerate framework for BLAS implementation. CUDA is not supported on macOS.

pip install --no-binary :all: faiss-cpu

To link to faiss library with avx2 support, set appropriate environment variables.

export FAISS_OPT_LEVEL=avx2
export FAISS_LDFLAGS="/usr/local/lib/libfaiss_avx2.a /usr/local/lib/libomp.a -framework Accelerate"
pip install --no-binary :all: faiss-cpu

Windows

Windows environment requires BLAS/LAPACK and fortran library. See .github/workflows/build.yml for how the binary wheels are built.