Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Failed Attempts at Building TensorFlow GPU from Source

For the last 3 weeks, I've been trying to build TensorFlow from source. I wanted to get TensorFlow GPU version working on Windows with CUDA 9.2 and cuDNN 7.1. Since the pre-built wheels only work with CUDA 9.0, the only way we can get it working with 9.2 is to build it ourselves from source.

The Windows build of TensorFlow is done using CMake. The official instructions are here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/contrib/cmake

Unfortunately, as I found out after multiple attempts, the build process is not as simple as it sounds.
Every attempt I have made to build it failed so far.

But, I decided to post the steps I took - which didn't work - so that you all may be able use it as a reference if you decided to try it out yourselves. Again, note that these steps did not work.

First, I started with gathering all the dependencies to build on Windows 10:
  • Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition With Update 3 (14.0.25431.01) with C++
  • Anaconda Python 3.6.5
  • Git for Windows 2.18.0
  • Swigwin 3.0.12
  • CUDA Toolkit 9.2
  • cuDNN 7.1
  • CMake 3.11.3