build tensorflow for intel xeon gold 6148

Question

I have a server with two Intel xeon gold 6148 and tensorflow running on it. When I install tf with pip I get a message that AVX2 and AVX512 is not used with my installation. So, to get the best performance I tried to build tf from source using docker. I did so following https://www.tensorflow.org/install/source but for the bazel build command I used:

bazel build --config=mkl -c opt --copt=-mavx --copt=-mavx2 --copt=-mfma --copt=-mavx512f --copt=-mavx512pf --copt=-mavx512cd --copt=-mavx512er //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package

following https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-optimization-for-tensorflow-installation-guide.
But this installation performs much worse than the standard pip installation.

So, to sum this up: what is the best way to install tensorflow an xeon gold architecture?

Answer 1

Try out using tensorflow wheel from the Intel website.

Please follow the below steps to create your own conda environment and to install the wheel.

1) conda create -n ENV_NAME -c intel python=3.6 pip numpy

2) source activate ENV_NAME

3) pip install https://storage.googleapis.com/intel-optimized-tensorflow/tensorflow-1.11.0-cp36-cp36m-linux_x86_64.whl

Hope this helps.