* ROCm 6.4.0 or later, including the :doc:`HIP runtime <hip:index>`. For more information, see `ROCm installation for Linux <https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/>`_.
Other AMD GPUs might function with unknown limitations. For the complete list of supported hardware, see `ROCm System Requirements <https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux-internal/en/latest/reference/system-requirements.html>`_.
* Inter-node communication requires MPI, and is tested with Open MPI and CX7 Infiniband NICs.
Available network backends
--------------------------
rocSHMEM supports two network backends:
* The **IPC (Inter-Process Communication)** backend enables fast communication between GPUs on the same host using ROCm inter-process mechanisms. It does not support inter-node communication.
* The **RO (Reverse Offload)** backend enables communication between GPUs on different nodes through a NIC, using a host-based proxy to forward communication orders to and from the GPU. In this release, RO is the only inter-node communication backend and is built on an MPI-RMA compatibility layer.
You can activate IPC and RO backends in the same rocSHMEM build. In this case, IPC handles intra-node communication, while RO handles inter-node communication.
This installation method requires ROCm 6.4 or later. You must manually build dependencies such as Open MPI and UCX, because the distribution packaged versions don't include full accelerator support. For more information, see :ref:`install-dependencies`.
You can select between two communication backends at build time for rocSHMEM: RO and IPC.
The default configuration enables both backends, using IPC for intra-node communication
RO for inter-node communication at runtime. In this configuration, rocSHMEM atomic operations always use the RO backend.
rocSHMEM also supports the IPC-only configuration, which allows atomic operations to use the IPC backend only.
RO and IPC backend build
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
To build and install rocSHMEM with the hybrid RO (off-node) and IPC (on-node) backends, run:
..code-block::bash
git clone git@github.com:ROCm/rocSHMEM.git
cd rocSHMEM
mkdir build
cd build
../scripts/build_configs/ro_ipc
The build script passes configuration options to CMake to set up a canonical build.
..note::
The only officially supported configuration for the RO backend uses Open MPI and UCX with a CX7 InfiniBand adapter. For more information, see :ref:`install-dependencies`. Other configurations, such as MPI implementations that are thread-safe and support GPU buffers, might work but are considered experimental.
The default configuration changed from IPC only in ROCm 6.4 (built with the ``ipc_single`` script) to RO and IPC in ROCm 7.0 (built with the ``ro_ipc`` script).
Other experimental configuration scripts are available in ``./scripts/build_configs``, but only ``ipc_single`` and ``ro_ipc``