[Nengo-Loihi]: `_Rendezvous` error while setting up NxSDK 0.9.0

Backends Loihi
1

So I am trying to set up NengoLoihi and NxSDK as detailed here. I am on the INRC cloud, thus it has default python 3.8.5; whereas for setting up NengoLoihi 1.0.0 I need python 3.5.2 and NxSDK version should be between 0.9.0 and 0.9.9 (both inclusive). Therefore in accordance with linked installation tutorial I executed all the steps, but after running my NxSDK code, it failed with following error:

_Rendezvous: <_Rendezvous of RPC that terminated with:
	status = StatusCode.UNAVAILABLE
	details = "Socket closed"
	debug_error_string = "{"created":"@1621718461.523719848","description":"Error received from peer","file":"src/core/lib/surface/call.cc","file_line":1039,"grpc_message":"Socket closed","grpc_status":14}"
>

It appears the above error message comes from grpc library:

~/miniconda3/envs/loihi/lib/python3.5/site-packages/grpc/_channel.py in _end_unary_response_blocking(state, call, with_call, deadline)
    464             return state.response
    465     else:
--> 466         raise _Rendezvous(state, None, None, deadline)
    467 
    468

I checked the installed version of grpc as well as that of NxSDK, they are ('1.19.0', '0.9') respectively (i.e. they were successfully imported).

In my second attempt I proceeded with following steps to setup NxSDK 0.9.0 on INRC.

  1. conda create --channel conda-forge --name venv_nxsdk_0_9 python=3.5.2
  2. python -m pip install nxsdk-0.9.tar.gz after activating the above environment
  3. SLURM=1 /nfs/ncl/bin/jupyter_nx.sh to launch the jupyter notebook

but after successful imports of NxSDK and grpc, the execution of my code still failed with the same above _Rendezvous error.

Please note that my code runs perfectly good with the latest version of NxSDK 1.0.0 (it has grpc 1.37.0) which was setup after following the installation steps mentioned on INRC. Since my intention is to eventually use NengoLoihi with NxSDK, I am attempting to install the supported versions but failing. Therefore I am posting my issue here to know how to fix it. Please let me know.

2

As far as I’m aware, NxSDK 0.9.9 and below are not supported in Ubuntu 20.04. But, NxSDK 1.0.0 requires Ubuntu 20.04 to run, which is why Intel had upgraded all of their cloud machines to use that version of Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, this means that if you are running things on the INRC cloud, you will be required to use NxSDK 1.0.0. We are working on an updated release of NengoLoihi to officially support NxSDK 1.0.0, but the primary developer of NengoLoihi is also currently working on other projects, so the release might take a while.

3

Hello @xchoo, thanks once again for looking into this. I guess that’s why I am getting this error. I had been looking into this topic as well and was successful installing NengoLoihi 1.1.0.dev. I hope I can continue my development with it without any issues and will wait for the official release.