A recent blog post 11 has claimed that building PyTorch from source yields a considerable training time speed-up with AlexNet-like architectures (approx. 31% for CUDA and 39% for CPU). These are very impressive performance gains and they come essentially for free.
Looking at the installation guide 17, I noticed that things are pretty straight-forward if you’re willing to go with Anaconda. However, the environment on which I mostly work prohibits the use of Anaconda; we essentially do everything using pip-like package managers. Browsing around for PyTorch installation guides using pip (while always building from source), I mostly encountered some pages from 2017, before PyTorch introduced pip installation.
I am wondering if anyone can share any recent successful attempts of building PyTorch from source while avoiding Anaconda. My OS is Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.