If you are experienced with PyTorch and have already installed it, just skip this part and jump to the [next section](#installation). Otherwise, you can follow these steps for the preparation.
**Step 0.** Download and install Miniconda from the [official website](https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html).
**Step 1.** Create a conda environment and activate it.
We recommend that users follow our best practices to install MMSelfSup. However, the whole process is highly customizable. See [Customize Installation](#customized-installation) section for more information.
### Best Practices
**Step 0.** Install [MMCV](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmcv) using [MIM](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mim).
The [Best Practices](#best-practices) is for basic usage, if you need to evaluate your pre-training model with some downstream tasks such as detection or segmentation, please also install [MMDetection](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection) and [MMSegmentation](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmsegmentation).
For more details, you can check the installation page of [MMDetection](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/blob/master/docs/en/get_started.md) and [MMSegmentation](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmsegmentation/blob/master/docs/en/get_started.md).
- For Ampere-based NVIDIA GPUs, such as GeForce 30 series and NVIDIA A100, CUDA 11 is a must.
- For older NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA 11 is backward compatible, but CUDA 10.2 offers better compatibility and is more lightweight.
Please make sure the GPU driver satisfies the minimum version requirements. See [this table](https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-toolkit-release-notes/index.html#cuda-major-component-versions__table-cuda-toolkit-driver-versions) for more information.
```{note}
Installing CUDA runtime libraries is enough if you follow our best practices, because no CUDA code will be compiled locally. However if you hope to compile MMCV from source or develop other CUDA operators, you need to install the complete CUDA toolkit from NVIDIA's [website](https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads), and its version should match the CUDA version of PyTorch. i.e., the specified version of cudatoolkit in `conda install` command.
MMCV contains C++ and CUDA extensions, thus depending on PyTorch in a complex way. MIM solves such dependencies automatically and makes the installation easier. However, it is not a must.
To install MMCV with pip instead of MIM, please follow [MMCV installation guides](https://mmcv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/get_started/installation.html). This requires manually specifying a find-url based on PyTorch version and its CUDA version.
For example, the following command install mmcv-full built for PyTorch 1.10.x and CUDA 11.3.
**Important:** Make sure you've installed the [nvidia-container-toolkit](https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-toolkit/install-guide.html#docker).
Within Jupyter, the exclamation mark `!` is used to call external executables and `%cd` is a [magic command](https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/interactive/magics.html#magic-cd) to change the current working directory of Python.
If there are more than one mmselfsup on your machine, and you want to use them alternatively, the recommended way is to create multiple conda environments and use different environments for different versions.