Huangying Zhan

Huangying Zhan

Staff Research Engineer at InnoPeak Technology, Inc.

GPU and Caffe Installation in Ubuntu

5 minute read

Published:

Summary

Caffe is a deep learning framework developed by Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC). It is specifically designed for deep neural network training and application, especially for convolutional neural networks. However, the training/computation is time-consuming in CPU mode. Therefore, GPU computing is introduced to accelerate the computation. In this post, NVIDIA GTX-1080 is used. GTX-1080 and Caffe installation procedure is recorded. The whole process is operated in Ubuntu 14.04.

Contents

  1. GTX-1080 installation
  2. Caffe installation

Part 1. GTX-1080 installation

The installation of GTX-1080 mainly refers to yangcha’s tutorial.

For different GPU devices, different driver should be installed. In here, the instruction is just for GTX-1080.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-367
$ sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev
$ sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev
# Reboot the system to load the driver
$ sudo reboot


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Part 2. Caffe installation

In this part, a simple installation instruction of Caffe is recorded. Basically, the steps are as following. First, install some dependencies for Caffe; Second, download and install Caffe; Third, compile Caffe.

The installation mainly refers to the following websites.


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2.1 Install CUDA

If you do not have a NVIDIA GPU supporting CUDA, you actually can ignore this step and move on to next step. Running Caffe without GPU is still possible, but losing the GPU computing feature. Now, for GPU users, visit NVIDIA’s cuda-toolkit and download CUDA 8.0RC. However, this requrest requires a NVIDIA membership, so join it and download CUDA 8.0RC.

After entering the download page, you will see that there are 3 types of installer. Just pick one and follow the installation instructions.

cuda

After installation, you need to set CUDA environment.

$ echo "# Add CUDA bin & library paths:" >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo "export PATH=/usr/local/cuda-8.0/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda-8.0/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

If you later on find that this export doesn’t work for Caffe, you can directly update Makefile.config in Caffe. We will see.


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2.2. Install dependencies

  1. Install general dependencies

     $ sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-dev libleveldb-dev libsnappy-dev libopencv-dev libhdf5-serial-dev protobuf-compiler
    
 $ sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

  2. Install ATLAS

     $ sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev

  3. Install remaining dependencies

     $ sudo apt-get install libgflags-dev libgoogle-glog-dev liblmdb-dev

    If you are not using Ubuntu 14.04, you may not be able to install these dependencies. Please refer to here.


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2.3. (Optional) Anaconda-python

Anaconda is a package which includes a lot of useful python packages/libraries. It is recommended to install Anaconda but not a compulsory part for Caffe.

Downalod the installer from the Anaconda’s dowloads pag一e.

$ cd ~/Downloads

# For different version's installer, 'xxx' is different, just refer to your downloaded installer.
$ bash Anaconda2-xxx.sh

Follow the installation guideline and accept the statements. After installation, open a new terminal and check for it by typing python in the terminal. After entering Python, you should see the Python version is something like Python 2.7.12 |Anaconda 4.1.1 (64-bit)|

Installation of Anaconda is completed! To know more, please refer to Anaconda’s tutorial or homepage.


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2.4. (Optional) OpenCV

Official requirement: OpenCV >=2.4, including 3.0. Installation of OpenCV is quite ugly, there are already some good instructions. Currently, this part is to be edited.


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2.5. Download Caffe

First, git is required, can be installed by

$ sudo apt-get install git

Then, clone caffe to a local directory

$ git clone https://github.com/BVLC/caffe.git
$ cd $CAFFE # $CAFFE is the directory of your downloaded Caffe
$ cp Makefile.config.example Makefile.config

You can modify the configuration before make in this Makefile.config. Here are some possible modifications.

# Anaconda (Uncomment the related part)
# If you are using Anaconda2, remember to udpate ANACONDA_HOME to anaconda2, uncomment this part and comment the original python setup

# PYTHON_INCLUDE := /usr/include/python2.7 \
#                /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/core/include

ANACONDA_HOME := $(HOME)/anaconda2
PYTHON_INCLUDE := $(ANACONDA_HOME)/include \
                 $(ANACONDA_HOME)/include/python2.7 \
                 $(ANACONDA_HOME)/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include \

# If you don't have a NVIDIA GPU supporting CUDA, you can uncomment a CPU-only switch to build without GPU support.
# CPU-only switch (uncomment to build without GPU support).
CPU_ONLY := 1

# Remember to update the CUDA_DIR as well.
$ CUDA_DIR := /usr/local/cuda-8.0

Then, we can start compiling Caffe.

$ make clean
$ make all -j8 # where -j8 means use 8 cores of your CPU for compilation which can accelerate the compilation. you should change -j according to the number of your CPU cores. 
$ make test -j8
$ make runtest -j8

If there is no error up to this stage, Caffe installation is completed.


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2.6. (Optional) Install PyCaffe (Python Caffe Interface)

If Python interface is used, follow the guideline to install PyCaffe

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev
$ cd $CAFFE/python

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip

$ for req in $(cat requirements.txt); do pip install $req; done

$ cd ..
$ make pycaffe

Up to here, the installation is completed!

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