Prior to installing, have a glance through this guide and take note of the details for your platform.
We install and run Caffe on Ubuntu 14.04, CentOS (7.0, 7.1, 7.2), and AWS.
The official Makefile and Makefile.config
build are complemented by an automatic CMake build from the community.
When updating Caffe, it's best to make clean
before re-compiling.
Before building Caffe make sure that the following dependencies are available on target system:
- BLAS library
- Boost >= 1.55
protobuf
,glog
,gflags
,hdf5
For additional capabilities and acceleration the following dependencies might be necessary:
-
OpenCV >= 2.4 including 3.0
-
IO libraries:
lmdb
,leveldb
(note: leveldb requiressnappy
) -
For GPU mode
- CUDA
- cuDNN
-
For Pycaffe
Python 2.7
orPython 3.3+
numpy (>= 1.7)
- boost-provided
boost.python
-
For Matcaffe
- MATLAB with the
mex
compiler.
- MATLAB with the
This version of Caffe is optimized for Intel® Xeon processors and Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors. To achieve the best performance results on Intel Architecture we recommend building Caffe with Intel MKL and enabling OpenMP support. If you don't have Intel MKL yet you can download it free of charge. The following configuration changes are recommended:
- Set
BLAS := mkl
inMakefile.config
- If you don't need GPU optimizations
CPU_ONLY := 1
flag inMakefile.config
to configure and build Caffe without CUDA.
Intel MKL 2017 Beta Update 1 introduces optimized Deep Neural Network (DNN) performance primitives that allow to accelerate the most popular image recognition topologies. Caffe can take advantage of these primitives and get significantly better performance results compared to the previous versions of Intel MKL. There are two ways to take advantage of the new primitives:
- At Caffe build time add
USE_MKL2017_AS_DEFAULT_ENGINE := 1
toMakefile.config
or add-DUSE_MKL2017_AS_DEFAULT_ENGINE=ON
to your commandline when invokingcmake
. All layers will use new primitives by default. - Set layer engine to
MKL2017
in model configuration. Only this specific layer will be accelerated with new primitives.
- For Better performance please disable Hyperthreading on your platoform.
Caffe requires the CUDA nvcc
compiler to compile its GPU code and CUDA driver for GPU operation.
To install CUDA, go to the NVIDIA CUDA website and follow installation instructions there. Install the library and the latest standalone driver separately; the driver bundled with the library is usually out-of-date. Warning! The 331.* CUDA driver series has a critical performance issue: do not use it.
For best performance on GPU, Caffe can be accelerated by NVIDIA cuDNN. Register for free at the cuDNN site, install it, then continue with these installation instructions. To compile with cuDNN set the USE_CUDNN := 1
flag set in your Makefile.config
.
Caffe requires BLAS as the backend of its matrix and vector computations. There are several implementations of this library. The choice is yours:
- ATLAS: free, open source, and so the default for Caffe.
- Intel MKL: free performance library for Intel Architecture
- Install Intel MKL. Free options are available
- Set
BLAS := mkl
inMakefile.config
- OpenBLAS: free and open source; this optimized and parallel BLAS could require more effort to install, although it might offer a speedup.
- Install OpenBLAS
- Set
BLAS := open
inMakefile.config
The main requirements are numpy
and boost.python
(provided by boost). pandas
is useful too and needed for some examples.
You can install the dependencies with
for req in $(cat requirements.txt); do pip install $req; done
but we suggest first installing the Anaconda Python distribution, which provides most of the necessary packages, as well as the hdf5
library dependency.
To import the caffe
Python module after completing the installation, add the module directory to your $PYTHONPATH
by export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/caffe/python:$PYTHONPATH
or the like. You should not import the module in the caffe/python/caffe
directory!
Caffe's Python interface works with Python 2.7. Python 3.3+ should work out of the box without protobuf support. For protobuf support please install protobuf 3.0 alpha (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/). Earlier Pythons are your own adventure.
Install MATLAB, and make sure that its mex
is in your $PATH
.
Caffe's MATLAB interface works with versions 2015a, 2014a/b, 2013a/b, and 2012b.
Caffe can be compiled with either Make or CMake. Make is officially supported while CMake is supported by the community.
Configure the build by copying and modifying the example Makefile.config
for your setup. The defaults should work, but uncomment the relevant lines if using Anaconda Python.
cp Makefile.config.example Makefile.config
# Adjust Makefile.config (for example, if using Anaconda Python, or if cuDNN is desired)
make all
make test
make runtest
- For CPU & GPU accelerated Caffe, no changes are needed.
- For cuDNN acceleration using NVIDIA's proprietary cuDNN software, uncomment the
USE_CUDNN := 1
switch inMakefile.config
. cuDNN is sometimes but not always faster than Caffe's GPU acceleration. - For CPU-only Caffe, uncomment
CPU_ONLY := 1
inMakefile.config
.
To compile the Python and MATLAB wrappers do make pycaffe
and make matcaffe
respectively.
Be sure to set your MATLAB and Python paths in Makefile.config
first!
Distribution: run make distribute
to create a distribute
directory with all the Caffe headers, compiled libraries, binaries, etc. needed for distribution to other machines.
Speed: for a faster build, compile in parallel by doing make all -j8
where 8 is the number of parallel threads for compilation (a good choice for the number of threads is the number of cores in your machine).
Now that you have installed Caffe, check out the MNIST tutorial and the reference ImageNet model tutorial.
In lieu of manually editing Makefile.config
to configure the build, Caffe offers an unofficial CMake build thanks to @Nerei, @akosiorek, and other members of the community. It requires CMake version >= 2.8.7.
The basic steps are as follows:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make all
make install
make runtest
See PR #1667 for options and details.
This software supports the following hardware:
- Intel® Xeon processor E5-xxxx v3 (codename Haswell) and Intel® Xeon processor E5-xxxx v4 (codename Broadwell)
- Next generation Intel® Xeon Phi™ product family (codenamed Knights Landing)
Berkeley Vision runs Caffe with K40s, K20s, and Titans including models at ImageNet/ILSVRC scale. We also run on GTX series cards (980s and 770s) and GPU-equipped MacBook Pros. We have not encountered any trouble in-house with devices with CUDA capability >= 3.0. All reported hardware issues thus-far have been due to GPU configuration, overheating, and the like.
Once installed, check your times against our reference performance numbers to make sure everything is configured properly.
Ask hardware questions on the caffe-users group.