Getting Started with Machine Learning
This is User:Ben's guide to getting started with machine learning.
Contents
Dependencies[edit]
Here's some useful dependencies that I use:
- uv
- This is similar to Pip but written in Rust and is way faster
- It has nice management of virtual environments
- Can use Conda instead but it is much slower
- Github Copilot
- mlfab
- This is a Python package I made to help make it easy to quickly try out machine learning ideas in PyTorch
- Coding tools
uv[edit]
To install uv
on the K-Scale clusters, run
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
To get started with uv
, pick a directory you want your virtual environment to live in. ($HOME
is not recommended.) Once you have cd
ed there, run
uv venv
If you are on the clusters, you instead may want to run
uv venv --python 3.11
to ensure that the virtual environment uses Python 3.11. This is because by default, uv uses the system's version of Python (whatever the result of which python
yields), and the clusters are running Python 3.10.12. (Python 3.11 will be useful because various projects, including the starter project, will require Python 3.11.)
To activate your virtual environment, run
source .venv/bin/activate
while in the directory you created your .venv
in.
Installing Starter Project[edit]
- Go to this project and install it
Opening the project in VSCode[edit]
- Create a VSCode config file that looks something like this:
{
"folders": [
{
"name": "Getting Started",
"path": "/home/ubuntu/Github/getting_started"
},
{
"name": "Workspaces",
"path": "/home/ubuntu/.code-workspaces"
}
],
"settings": {
"cmake.configureSettings": {
"CMAKE_CUDA_COMPILER": "/usr/bin/nvcc",
"CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH": [
"/home/ubuntu/.virtualenvs/getting-started/lib/python3.11/site-packages/torch/share/cmake"
],
"PYTHON_EXECUTABLE": "/home/ubuntu/.virtualenvs/getting-started/bin/python",
"TORCH_CUDA_ARCH_LIST": "'8.0'"
},
"python.defaultInterpreterPath": "/home/ubuntu/.virtualenvs/getting-started/bin/python",
"ruff.path": [
"/home/ubuntu/.virtualenvs/getting-started/bin/ruff"
]
}
}
- Install the VSCode SSH extension
- SSH into the cluster (see K-Scale Cluster for instructions)
- Open the workspace that you created in VSCode
Useful Brain Dump Stuff[edit]
- Use
breakpoint()
to debug code - Check out the mlfab examples directory for some ideas
- It is a good idea to try to write the full training loop yourself to figure out what's going on
- Run
nvidia-smi
to see the GPUs and their statuses/any active processes