Frequently Asked Questions#
- Does Legate only work on NVIDIA hardware?
No, Legate will run on any processor supported by Legion (e.g. x86, ARM, and PowerPC CPUs), as well as any network supported by GASNet or UCX (e.g. Infiniband, Cray, Omnipath, and (ROC-)Ethernet based interconnects).
- What languages does the Legate Core API have bindings for?
Currently the Legate Core bindings are only available in Python. Watch this space for new language bindings soon or make a pull request to contribute your own. Legion has a C API which should make it easy to develop bindings in any language with a foreign function interface.
- Do I have to build drop-in replacement libraries?
No! While we’ve chosen to provide drop-in replacement libraries for popular Python libraries to illustrate the benefits of Legate, you are both welcomed and encouraged to develop your own libraries on top of Legate. We promise that they will compose well with other existing Legate libraries.
- What other libraries are you planning to release for the Legate ecosystem?
We’re still working on that. If you have thoughts about what is important please let us know at legate@nvidia.com so that we can get a feel for where best to put our time.
- Can I use Legate with other Legion libraries?
Yes! If you’re willing to extract the Legion primitives from the
LegateStoreobjects you should be able to pass them into other Legion libraries such as FlexFlow.- Does Legate interoperate with X?
Yes, probably, but we don’t recommend it. Our motivation for building Legate is to provide the bare minimum subset of functionality that we believe is essential for building truly composable software that can still run at scale. No other systems out there met our needs. Providing interoperability with those other systems will destroy the very essence of what Legate is and significantly dilute its benefits. All that being said, Legion does provide some means of doing stop-the-world exchanges with other runtime system running concurrently in the same processes. If you are interested in pursuing this approach please open an issue on the Legion github issue tracker as it will be almost entirely orthogonal to how you use Legate.
- What platform and library versions does Legate support?
The following table lists Legate’s minimum supported versions of major dependencies.
“Full support” means that the corresponding versions (and all later ones) are being tested with some regularity, and are expected to work. Please report any incompatibility you find against a fully-supported version by opening a bug.
“Best-effort support” means that the corresponding versions are not actively tested, but Legate should be compatible with them. We will not actively work to fix any incompatibilities discovered under these versions, but we accept contributions that fix such incompatibilities.
Dependency
Full support (min version)
Best-effort support (min version)
CPU architecture
x86-64 (Haswell), aarch64
ppc64le, older x86-64, Apple Silicon
OS
RHEL 8, Ubuntu 20.04, MacOS 12
other Linux
C++ compiler
gcc 8, clang 7, nvc++ 19.1
any compiler with C++17 support
GPU architecture
Volta
Pascal
CUDA toolkit
12.0
10.0
Python
3.10
NumPy
1.22
Legate is tested and guaranteed to be compatible with Volta and later GPU architectures. You can use Legate with Pascal GPUs as well, but there could be issues due to lack of independent thread scheduling. Please report any such issues on GitHub.
Legate has been tested on Linux and MacOS, although only a few flavors of Linux such as Ubuntu have been thoroughly tested. There is currently no support for Windows.