MXNet R package on an Amazon Linux Deep Learning EC2 instance - r

Question

I'm attempting to setup an Amazon Linux EC2 instance with MXNet and R (and the MXNet r package available as well). Unfortunately this has been a lot harder than I expected.
I've attempted to follow the instructions from MXNet using Amazon's deep learning AMI with CUDA 8.0 on a p2.xlarge (https://mxnet.incubator.apache.org/get_started/install.html)
However I get the same error when attempting to compile the mxnet r package from this SO post:
Issues installing mxnet GPU R package for Amazon deep learning AMI
The solution discussed in that post are somewhat beyond my abilities to fully test/debug. i.e. I'm not particularly familiar with linux environment variables and such to modify. I've also reviewed some issues raised on the apache-incubator github for MXnet and those were pretty unhelpful as well.
So my questions are,
Is anyone aware of any available AMI's which come pre-packaged with R and MXNet? The ones I see seem to only include python.
Have a working set of instructions (or a script) to run on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance to install the required dependencies (assuming Im using some type of deep learning AMI that comes with CUDA 8.0 at least) to install the MXnet R package?

Answer 1

Right so I was the guy on the other post and I DID eventually get it working. Took 50+ hours and I'm not 100% sure where the issue was because...linux.
sudo yum install R
sudo yum install libxml2-devel
sudo yum install cairo-devel
sudo yum install giflib-devel
sudo yum install libXt-devel
sudo R
install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("igraph/rigraph")
install.packages(c(“DiagrammeR”, “roxygen2”, “rgexf”, “influenceR”, “Cairo”, “imager”))
cd
cd /src/mxnet
cp make/config.mk .
echo "USE_BLAS=openblas" >>config.mk
echo "ADD_CFLAGS += -I/usr/include/openblas" >>config.mk
echo "ADD_LDFLAGS += /usr/local/lib" >>config.mk
echo "USE_CUDA=1" >>config.mk
echo "USE_CUDA_PATH=/usr/local/cuda-9.0/lib64" >>config.mk
echo "USE_CUDNN=1" >>config.mk
*add another LD flag for /usr/local/lib
cd /etc/ld.so.conf.d/
sudo nano cuda.conf
Insert  /usr/local/cuda-9.0/lib64
cd
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda-9.0/lib64/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
sudo ldconfig
cd R-package
Rscript -e "install.packages('devtools', repo = 'https://cran.rstudio.com')"
Rscript -e "library(devtools); library(methods);options(repos=c(CRAN='https://cran.rstudio.com'));install_deps(dependencies = TRUE)"
cd ..
sudo make rpkg
THEN you gotta make sure R/Rstudio can actually find those libraries:
cd /etc/rstudio
sudo nano rserver.conf
You can add elements to the default LD_LIBRARY_PATH for R sessions (as determined by the R ldpaths script) by adding an rsession-ld-library-path entry to the server config file. This might be useful for ensuring that packages can locate external library dependencies that aren't installed in the system standard library paths. For example:
rsession-ld-library-path=/opt/local/lib:/usr/local/cuda/lib64