The Arm NN Delegate can be found within the Arm NN repository but it is a standalone piece of software. However, it makes use of the Arm NN library. For this reason we have added two options to build the delegate. The first option allows you to build the delegate together with the Arm NN library, the second option is a standalone build of the delegate.
This tutorial uses an Aarch64 machine with Ubuntu 18.04 installed that can build all components natively (no cross-compilation required). This is to keep this guide simple.
Table of content:
Dependencies
Build Dependencies:
- Tensorflow Lite: this guide uses version 2.5.1 . Other versions may work.
- Flatbuffers 1.12.0
- Arm NN 21.11 or higher
Required Tools:
- Git. This guide uses version 2.17.1. Other versions might work.
- pip. This guide uses version 20.3.3. Other versions might work.
- wget. This guide uses version 1.17.1. Other versions might work.
- zip. This guide uses version 3.0. Other versions might work.
- unzip. This guide uses version 6.00. Other versions might work.
- cmake 3.16.0 or higher. This guide uses version 3.16.0
- scons. This guide uses version 2.4.1. Other versions might work.
Our first step is to build all the build dependencies I have mentioned above. We will have to create quite a few directories. To make navigation a bit easier define a base directory for the project. At this stage we can also install all the tools that are required during the build. This guide assumes you are using a Bash shell.
export BASEDIR=~/ArmNNDelegate
mkdir $BASEDIR
cd $BASEDIR
apt-get update && apt-get install git wget unzip zip python git cmake scons
Build Tensorflow Lite for C++
Tensorflow has a few dependencies on it's own. It requires the python packages pip3, numpy, and also Bazel or CMake which are used to compile Tensorflow. A description on how to build bazel can be found here. But for this guide, we will compile with CMake. Depending on your operating system and architecture there might be an easier way.
wget -O cmake-3.16.0.tar.gz https://cmake.org/files/v3.16/cmake-3.16.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf cmake-3.16.0.tar.gz -C $BASEDIR/cmake-3.16.0
# If you have an older CMake, remove installed in order to upgrade
yes | sudo apt-get purge cmake
hash -r
cd $BASEDIR/cmake-3.16.0
./bootstrap
make
sudo make install
Download and build Tensorflow Lite
cd $BASEDIR
git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow.git
cd tensorflow/
git checkout tags/v2.5.1 # Minimum version required for the delegate is v2.3.1
Now the build process can be started. When calling "cmake", as below, you can specify a number of build flags. But if you have no need to configure your tensorflow build, you can follow the exact commands below:
cmake $BASEDIR/tensorflow
cmake --build $BASEDIR/tflite-output # This will be your DTFLITE_LIB_ROOT directory
Build Flatbuffers
Flatbuffers is a memory efficient cross-platform serialization library as described here. It is used in tflite to store models and is also a dependency of the delegate. After downloading the right version it can be built and installed using cmake.
cd $BASEDIR
wget -O flatbuffers-1.12.0.zip https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/archive/v1.12.0.zip
unzip -d . flatbuffers-1.12.0.zip
cd flatbuffers-1.12.0
mkdir install && mkdir build && cd build
# I'm using a different install directory but that is not required
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$BASEDIR/flatbuffers-1.12.0/install
make install
Build the Arm Compute Library
The Arm NN library depends on the Arm Compute Library (ACL). It provides a set of functions that are optimized for both Arm CPUs and GPUs. The Arm Compute Library is used directly by Arm NN to run machine learning workloads on Arm CPUs and GPUs.
It is important to have the right version of ACL and Arm NN to make it work. Luckily, Arm NN and ACL are developed very closely and released together. If you would like to use the Arm NN version "20.11" you should use the same "20.11" version for ACL too.
To build the Arm Compute Library on your platform, download the Arm Compute Library and checkout the tag that contains the version you want to use. Build it using scons.
cd $BASEDIR
git clone https://review.mlplatform.org/ml/ComputeLibrary
cd ComputeLibrary/
git checkout <tag_name> # e.g. v20.11
# The machine used for this guide only has a Neon CPU which is why I only have "neon=1" but if
# your machine has an arm Gpu you can enable that by adding `opencl=1 embed_kernels=1 to the command below
scons arch=arm64-v8a neon=1 extra_cxx_flags="-fPIC" benchmark_tests=0 validation_tests=0
Build the Arm NN Library
With ACL built we can now continue to building Arm NN. To do so, download the repository and checkout the matching version as you did for ACL. Create a build directory and use cmake to build it.
cd $BASEDIR
git clone "https://review.mlplatform.org/ml/armnn"
cd armnn
git checkout <branch_name> # e.g. branches/armnn_20_11
mkdir build && cd build
# if you've got an arm Gpu add `-DARMCOMPUTECL=1` to the command below
cmake .. -DARMCOMPUTE_ROOT=$BASEDIR/ComputeLibrary -DARMCOMPUTENEON=1 -DBUILD_UNIT_TESTS=0
make
Build the TfLite Delegate (Stand-Alone)
The delegate as well as Arm NN is built using cmake. Create a build directory as usual and build the delegate with the additional cmake arguments shown below
cd $BASEDIR/armnn/delegate && mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release # A release build rather than a debug build.
-DTENSORFLOW_ROOT=$BASEDIR/tensorflow \ # The root directory where tensorflow can be found.
-DTFLITE_LIB_ROOT=$BASEDIR/tflite-output \ # Directory where tensorflow libraries can be found.
-DFLATBUFFERS_ROOT=$BASEDIR/flatbuffers-1.12.0/install \ # Flatbuffers install directory.
-DArmnn_DIR=$BASEDIR/armnn/build \ # Directory where the Arm NN library can be found
-DARMNN_SOURCE_DIR=$BASEDIR/armnn # The top directory of the Arm NN repository.
# Required are the includes for Arm NN
make
To ensure that the build was successful you can run the unit tests for the delegate that can be found in the build directory for the delegate. Doctest was used to create those tests. Using test filters you can filter out tests that your build is not configured for. In this case, because Arm NN was only built for Cpu acceleration (CpuAcc), we filter for all test suites that have CpuAcc in their name.
cd $BASEDIR/armnn/delegate/build
./DelegateUnitTests --test-suite=*CpuAcc*
If you have built for Gpu acceleration as well you might want to change your test-suite filter:
./DelegateUnitTests --test-suite=*CpuAcc*,*GpuAcc*
Build the Delegate together with Arm NN
In the introduction it was mentioned that there is a way to integrate the delegate build into Arm NN. This is pretty straight forward. The cmake arguments that were previously used for the delegate have to be added to the Arm NN cmake arguments. Also another argument BUILD_ARMNN_TFLITE_DELEGATE needs to be added to instruct Arm NN to build the delegate as well. The new commands to build Arm NN are as follows:
Download Arm NN if you have not already done so:
cd $BASEDIR
git clone "https://review.mlplatform.org/ml/armnn"
cd armnn
git checkout <branch_name> # e.g. branches/armnn_20_11
Build Arm NN with the delegate included
cd $BASEDIR
cd armnn
rm -rf build # Remove any previous cmake build.
mkdir build && cd build
# if you've got an arm Gpu add `-DARMCOMPUTECL=1` to the command below
cmake .. -DARMCOMPUTE_ROOT=$BASEDIR/ComputeLibrary \
-DARMCOMPUTENEON=1 \
-DBUILD_UNIT_TESTS=0 \
-DBUILD_ARMNN_TFLITE_DELEGATE=1 \
-DTENSORFLOW_ROOT=$BASEDIR/tensorflow \
-DTFLITE_LIB_ROOT=$BASEDIR/tflite-output \
-DFLATBUFFERS_ROOT=$BASEDIR/flatbuffers-1.12.0/install
make
The delegate library can then be found in build/armnn/delegate.
The TFLite Model Benchmark Tool has a useful command line interface to test delegates. We can use this to demonstrate the use of the Arm NN delegate and its options.
Some examples of this can be viewed in this YouTube demonstration.
Download the TFLite Model Benchmark Tool
Binary builds of the benchmarking tool for various platforms are available here. In this example I will target an aarch64 Linux environment. I will also download a sample uint8 tflite model from the Arm ML Model Zoo.
mkdir $BASEDIR/benchmarking
cd $BASEDIR/benchmarking
# Get the benchmarking binary.
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow-nightly-public/prod/tensorflow/release/lite/tools/nightly/latest/linux_aarch64_benchmark_model -O benchmark_model
# Make it executable.
chmod +x benchmark_model
# and a sample model from model zoo.
wget https://github.com/ARM-software/ML-zoo/blob/master/models/image_classification/mobilenet_v2_1.0_224/tflite_uint8/mobilenet_v2_1.0_224_quantized_1_default_1.tflite?raw=true -O mobilenet_v2_1.0_224_quantized_1_default_1.tflite
## Execute the benchmarking tool with the Arm NN delegate
cd $BASEDIR/benchmarking
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../armnn/build ./benchmark_model --graph=mobilenet_v2_1.0_224_quantized_1_default_1.tflite --external_delegate_path="../armnn/build/delegate/libarmnnDelegate.so" --external_delegate_options="backends:CpuAcc;logging-severity:info"
The "external_delegate_options" here are specific to the Arm NN delegate. They are used to specify a target Arm NN backend or to enable/disable various options in Arm NN. A full description can be found in the parameters of function tflite_plugin_create_delegate.
Integrate the Arm NN TfLite Delegate into your project
The delegate can be integrated into your c++ project by creating a TfLite Interpreter and instructing it to use the Arm NN delegate for the graph execution. This should look similiar to the following code snippet.
// Create TfLite Interpreter
std::unique_ptr<Interpreter> armnnDelegateInterpreter;
InterpreterBuilder(tfLiteModel, ::tflite::ops::builtin::BuiltinOpResolver())
(&armnnDelegateInterpreter)
// Create the Arm NN Delegate
armnnDelegate::DelegateOptions delegateOptions(backends);
std::unique_ptr<TfLiteDelegate, decltype(&armnnDelegate::TfLiteArmnnDelegateDelete)>
theArmnnDelegate(armnnDelegate::TfLiteArmnnDelegateCreate(delegateOptions),
armnnDelegate::TfLiteArmnnDelegateDelete);
// Instruct the Interpreter to use the armnnDelegate
armnnDelegateInterpreter->ModifyGraphWithDelegate(theArmnnDelegate.get());
For further information on using TfLite Delegates please visit the tensorflow website
For more details of the kind of options you can pass to the Arm NN delegate please check the parameters of function tflite_plugin_create_delegate.
1.8.13 