Setting up Environments

If you're new to Common Lisp:

1. Installing Roswell

Roswell is an environment manager for Common Lisp.

See the Readme.md and install Roswell

2. Installing Common Lisp

Common Lisp has several implementations of ANSI Common Lisp. The development is ongoing under SBCL due to its performance and the good support of arithmetic operations. Differences between different implementations are handled by CFFI (I guess), so it should work with other processors, but it has not been tested. (Modern Mode probably doesn't work.)

If you've installed Roswell:

$ ros install sbcl
$ ros use <Installed SBCL Version>
$ ros run # REPL is launched.

should work and everything is done.

3. Setting up IDE (optional)

The following editors are recommended as we are working with the REPL:

Emacs + Slime
Lem Lem is an emacs-like text editor specialized on Common Lisp.

Installing cl-waffe2

As of this writing(2023/9/13), cl-waffe2 is not yet available on Quicklisp. So, I am sorry but you have to install it manually.

With roswell, the latest cl-waffe2 repository can be fetched like:

$ ros install hikettei/cl-waffe2

In this case, you have to note that SBCL also needs to be started via Roswell.

Another valid option would be loading the cl-waffe2.asd file manually after cloning the cl-waffe2 github repos:

$ git clone https://github.com/hikettei/cl-waffe2.git
$ cd ./cl-waffe2
$ ros run # start repl
$ (load "cl-waffe2.asd")
$ (ql:quickload :cl-waffe2)
$ (in-package :cl-waffe2-repl) # or make repl

After you have ensured that it works, move the ./cl-waffe2 directory to ~/quicklisp/local-projects/ and quicklisp can find the project!

In order to get the full performance of cl-waffe2, you also have to do the following steps:

Setting up BLAS

cl-waffe2 searches for and reads the libblas file by default. The following steps are only necessary if you get a warning when loading the library

First, install the libopenblas library

# with ubuntu, for example:
$ apt install libopenblas

# With macOS
$ brew install libopenblas

Load the package again:

$ ros run
$ (load "cl-waffe2.asd")
$ (ql:quickload :cl-waffe2)

If you get no warning after loading cl-waffe2, CPUTensor is successfully enabled and can recognize the OpenBLAS. If you still get warnings, you need to apply additional configs because cl-waffe2 could not find out the location.

So, In your init file, (e.g.: ~/.roswell/init.lisp or ~/.sbclrc), add the code below for example. (Change the path depending on your environment. You can find where you've installed the library with $ locate libblas for example of macOS).

;; In ~~/.sbclrc for example:
(defparameter *cl-waffe-config*
    `((:libblas \"libblas.dylib for example\")))

It should work. If you still get warnings or encountered some problems, feel free to make an issue.

Building SIMD Extension

SIMD Extension is an extension for speeding up the execution of mathematical functions and some instructions (including sparse matrix) on the CPU.

$ make build_simd_extension

and everything should be ok. Ensure that no warnings are displayed in your terminal after loaded cl-waffe2.

Is GPU(CUDA/Metal/OpenCL etc...) supported?

Currently, no. But cl-waffe2 is designed to be independent of which devices work on, and writing extension is easy. Personally, I do not have enough environment and equipment to do the test, so I plan to do it one day when I save up the money.