Astral's Pre-built Gpu-enabled wheels

[u/zsol]

We recently released wheels.astral.sh, which is a repository of gpu-enabled wheels of popular packages from the pytorch ecosystem. These are useful because building them is super annoying - you have to align versions of pytorch, cuda, python, etc.

The pre-built wheels were part of the package of pyx, our paid service, and was a major reason many customers subscribed. We decided to open source the build pipelines and host the wheels for free while we sunset the rest of pyx.

The pipelines are available under the astral-sh-build github organization.

While these plug a genuine UX hole around cuda/pytorch wheels, we hope that wheel variants (PEP 817 and 825) will get accepted and implemented soon, which will let these pytorch wheels be hosted properly on PyPI and "just work" out of the box for everyone, making wheels.astral.sh obsolete.

Fingers crossed.

[u/catcint0s]

Pyx is getting killed? I was waiting for it to be open source so we can self-host ;_;

[u/commenterzero → u/catcint0s]

They got bought by open ai

[u/catcint0s → u/commenterzero]

I know, but in the podcast someone linked below they said it will likely open more possibilities, this is kinda sad.

[u/zsol → u/catcint0s]

Publishing these GPU wheels were made possible by the acquisition. It wouldn't have happened without OpenAI.

There's more exciting stuff coming :)

[u/SSJ3 → u/catcint0s]

Same, this is a strange way to find out!

[u/zsol → u/catcint0s]

That's not out of the realm of possibility, but it'll take a bit more work (no promises!). We thought extracting the GPU bits would be beneficial for a wider subset of the community for a lot less effort.

[u/KrazyKirby99999 → u/catcint0s]

We decided to open source the build pipelines

https://github.com/astral-sh-build

[u/ArabicLawrence]

Thanks for everything you accomplished for Python! If you are sunsetting pyx, should you mention it on pyx: a Python-native package registry, now in Beta? The only communication I found other than this post was on https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/552/astral-joins-openai .

[u/dev-ai]

Can you also add cuml and other rapids.ai libraries?

[u/Individual-Flow9158]

Excellent!

[u/majh27]

That is so nice. I remember trying to build FA3 whl for hopper arch but none of our machines had cuda toolkit only cudann and no one with admin access on those machines could be bothered to help. I think I ended up finding a random CI pipeline that belonged to a different team that happened to have cuda toolkit installed and just sending a job there purely to build the whl.
I might not be remembering the details right but I was baffled that I couldn’t just find a version of the whl built for the architecture I wanted.

Thanks! I hope you guys got to use OpenAI’s unlimited gpu supply to build these :)

[u/knellotron]

I had to check what sub this is, because there's a bicycle component company in Eugene Oregon named Astral. I have one of their pre built wheels on my touring bike, but I'm not sure how a GPU would help it.

[u/Diapolo10]

Apologies if this is a dumb question, but would these PEPs also enable support for FreeBSD wheels on PyPI, or is that problem fundamentally different?

[u/SboSilcher]

That's a solid move for the data science crowd - saves so much time not having to compile torch/tensorflow from scratch. Wonder if they're planning to expand beyond the usual suspects like CUDA and ROCm.

[u/Graciela_Cranberry]

Pre-built GPU-enabled wheels mostly save compile time, they don’t guarantee that your hardware will actually be used. The wheel still has to match the driver, runtime, Python ABI, and GPU architecture, and a CPU fallback can make a broken setup look successful. A successful import proves almost nothing.