Installation Precautions

Development Environment

The development environment is used to convert model files, develop and compile applications, and develop operators.

If you need to debug an application (for example, an image classification application) in the development environment in addition to developing and compiling the application, you need to configure Ascend AI devices (such as inference cards) in the development environment.

The pure development environment requires only the development kit to be installed.

In the development + commissioning scenario, you also need to install the driver and firmware corresponding to the inference card.

Operating Environment

The operating environment is an environment for running applications developed by users. The operating environment must be configured with Ascend AI devices (inference cards). Applications depend on the offline inference engine package, Toolbox, driver, and firmware to perform offline accelerated inference.

The operating environment includes the following two scenarios:

• Physical machine scenario: The inference card driver, firmware, offline inference engine package, and Toolbox are installed on a physical machine. Applications developed by users run on the physical machine.
• Container scenario:
  1. The inference card driver, firmware, and Toolbox are installed on a host.
  2. The offline inference engine package, user-developed applications, and basic container images are encapsulated into a service inference image.
  3. In the operating environment, the image is used to start the containers and checks whether the user-developed applications can run properly. The applications then run as containers.

Easy Installation Tool

The easy installation tool allows users to install software required by a specific service scenario by one click. For example, users can install the inference operating environment and install Ascend chip drivers, firmware, inference engines, and Toolbox at the same time by one click. You are advised to use the easy installation tool to install the software, improving the installation efficiency.

The installation of the development environment mainly involves the installation of the development kit. Therefore, the speed of installing the development environment by using the easy installation tool is similar to that by using the CLI. You can select the installation mode as required.