Test Neural Networks IO using gRPC and Protobuffers

Integration of gRPC in python is very straightforward via pip. But it becomes tricky to integrate gRPC in a C++ project that works cross-platform. Compiling gRPC from source and linking it properly takes a lot of time and there are tons of errors related to CMake and protobuffers.

In this project, there are two ways to build the C++ client: install gRPC via vcpkg or conan. The former is very easy to setup and it takes a while (10~30 min) because vcpkg will build gRPC from source. The later just downloads binaries from conan-center and you don't need to build the libraries from source. So it's fast; but it may take a few minutes to set conan up on your machine.

NOTE: If you choose to install gRPC via vcpkg, please change version of grpcio and grpcio-tools to 1.54.2 in requirements.txt. You have to do that because vcpkg cannot easily control the version of libraries. In this case, vcpkg always install gRPC v1.54.2 and we have to adapt the python libraries so they could communicate.

Create a virtual python environment for this project since we need some tools:

# create a virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv
# activate the environment
source venv/bin/activate
# install packages
pip install -r requirements.txt

Build the C++ client with conan 1.X

With conan version 1.60, we don't need to use vcpkg to build gRPC which will take a while. On windows, the build time could be even longer. Even that build only happens once per machine, I still like to avoid it.

If you use conan for the first time, you need to configure it:

# create a default profile
conan profile new --detect default
# change cxx abi for gcc
conan profile update settings.compiler.libcxx=libstdc++11 default

See the profile of my Linux machine.

Release build:

# install libraries for your profile using conan
conan install . -pr:b ./profile_gcc_11 --install-folder=buildRelease
cmake --preset release -B buildRelease
cmake --build buildRelease

Debug build:

conan install . -pr:b ./profile_gcc_11 -s build_type=Debug --install-folder=buildDebug
cmake --preset debug -B buildDebug
cmake --build buildDebug

On Windows it should work similarly, except for the profile.

Python Server

Copy pyserver.py to folder pyMsg and run:

ln pyserver.py pyMsg/pyserver.py
cd pyMsg
python pyserver.py

Test with SAM

# install pytorch with CPU. Feel free to use a different variant.
# see https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu
pip install git+https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything.git
pip install opencv-python pycocotools matplotlib onnxruntime onnx

Download the ViT-B SAM model.

ln  pyserverSAM.py pyMsg/pyserverSAM.py
python pyMsg/pyseverSAM.py

Then start the C++ client:

./buildRelease/bin/sam_client

References:

• Quickstart C++ gRPC
• Install gRPC
• Announcing out-of-the-box support for gRPC in the Flatbuffers serialization library
• git submodules - could not get a repository handle for submodule
• grpc can't find protobuf library
• What is a correct way to setup protobuf and grpc for cpp project?