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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing guidelines

If you have improvements to the Intel MKL-DNN code, please send us your pull requests! For getting started, see GitHub howto.

The current guidelines are work in progress.

Pull request checklist

Before sending your pull requests, please make sure that you followed this list.

Library functionality guidelines

Intel MKL-DNN focuses on functionality that satisfies all of the following criteria:

  1. Performance: the functionality has material impact on a workload level. In other words, this means that for a new primitive it should be demonstrated that it brings visible performance improvement to some workload.

  2. Generality: the functionality is useful in a wide range of deep learning applications. This implies that when introducing a new primitive, its API needs to be general enough to be integrated into multiple deep learning frameworks that have similar functionality.

  3. Complexity: it is not trivial to implement the functionality directly in a deep learning application.

RFC pull requests

It is strongly advised to open an RFC pull request when contributing new primitives. In the RFC, please provide the following details:

  • The expected performance benefit. This usually best presented as a profiling information from a workload showing that a particular operation takes significant percentage of the total time and thus is a good optimization candidate.

  • The definition of the operation as an MKL-DNN primitive including interface and semantics. It is OK to have sketches for the interface, but the semantics should be fairly well defined.

  • If possible, provide information about similar compute operations. Sometimes Intel MKL-DNN primitives are super-sets of operations available in the deep learning applications for the sake of greater portability across them.

Code contribution guidelines

The code must be:

  • Tested: Intel MKL-DNN uses gtests for lightweight functional testing and benchdnn for functionality that requires both performance and functional testing.

  • Documented: Intel MKL-DNN uses Doxygen for inline comments in public header files that is used to build reference manual and markdown (also processed by Doxygen) for user guide.

  • Portable: Intel MKL-DNN supports different operating systems, CPU and GPU architectures, compilers, and run-times. The new code should be complaint with the System Requirements.

Coding style

The general principle is to follow the style of existing / surrounding code.

Particularly:

  • Use 4-space indentation.
  • Limit line length to 80 columns.
  • Do put spaces after if, for, switch; otherwise, do not put spaces around braces, parenthesis, square or angle brackets.
  • Do put spaces around binary arithmetic operators.
  • Avoid trailing and double spaces (unless used for indentation).
  • Do not indent namespaces, private:, public:, protected: and case labels.
  • Keep opening brace on the same line as the statement or function.

If in doubt, use the clang-format:

clang-format -style=file -i foo.cpp

This will format code using the _clang_format file found in the Intel MKL-DNN top level directory.

Coding style is secondary to the general code design.

Unit tests

Intel MKL-DNN uses gtests for lightweight functional testing and benchdnn for performance and functional testing.

Be sure to extend the existing tests when fixing an issue.

Developing new benchdnn tests can be hard, so it is a good idea to start with gtests first.