Installing the SDK

Most bitfount functionality can be achieved using the Bitfount Desktop application. However, for more complex use cases, the SDK provides a more flexible and powerful way to interact with Bitfount. Anything that can be done in the Bitfount Desktop can also be done using the SDK. In this guide, we will cover the installation of the SDK and how to use it to interact with Bitfount to connect datasets, test machine learning models and run federated tasks.

The Bitfount SDK is published on PyPI and can be installed simply using pip.

pip install bitfount

The SDK requires a Python 3.12 environment and can be installed on MacOS (Apple Silicon only), Linux and Windows.

If running on Windows or Linux with an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA installed, you will need to modify the command to include the appropriate PyTorch wheel for your CUDA version. For instance if you have CUDA 12.6 installed, you would use the following command:

pip install bitfount -f https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126

Alternatively, find the appropriate command for your OS and CUDA version here and install that in your environment first before installing the bitfount package as normal.