FAQ

How do I specify the target hardware architecture for CATLASS?

At the first community meeting in March 2026, we officially confirmed that the CATLASS community mainline would add support for the next-generation Ascend hardware, Ascend 950PR and Ascend 950DT. Official support starts with CATLASS 1.5.0. To distinguish the underlying interface implementations across platforms, this support introduces a compilation macro that must be set in the corresponding build commands.

• New macro: CATLASS_ARCH, which specifies the target architecture. Its value is listed in the __NPU_ARCH__ column of SIMD BuiltIn Keywords.

  • Atlas A2 Training Series Products / Atlas A2 Inference Series Products: 2201
  • Atlas A3 Training Series Products / Atlas A3 Inference Series Products: 2201
  • Ascend 950PR/Ascend 950DT: 3510

• Usage by scenario:

  • bisheng command line: bisheng ... -DCATLASS_ARCH=2201 ...
  • cmake: add_compile_definitions(CATLASS_ARCH=2201)
  • msopgen/aclnn projects:
    • Old syntax (CANN < 9.0.0): add_ops_compile_options(ALL OPTIONS -DCATLASS_ARCH=2201 ...)
    • New syntax (CANN >= 9.0.0): npu_op_kernel_options(ascendc_kernels ALL OPTIONS -DCATLASS_ARCH=2201) (in an msopgen project, the first parameter defaults to ascendc_kernels and can be adjusted as needed)
  • CATLASS source repository: bash scripts/build.sh -DCATLASS_ARCH=2201 ...
  • Code reference: examples/CMakeLists.txt