Abhijit Annaldas

Installing Tensorflow-GPU on Windows

To use tensorflow library on GPU, NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and cuDNN libraries need to be first installed. Installing tensorflow-gpu is straight forward. Installing the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and cuDNN is slightly tricky, we need to ensure a couple of things so that CUDA toolkit works that tensorflow-gpu uses under the hood.

Let’s begin…

• Download CUDA Toolkit 8.0 and cuDNN v5.1 for CUDA Toolkit 8.0 from NVIDIA Developer portal
• Install CUDA Toolkit 8.0
  • Sometimes if the GPU is a latest one, CUDA Toolkit may not have support for it. This shouldn’t stop you from using CUDA Tookit, but the CUDA Toolkit installation warns that it couldn’t find a compatible GPU Hardware. In that case, go for a custom installation and choose not to install the drivers. Should be easy to identify in the custom install screen.
• Copy the contents of the cuDNN downloaded archive into CUDA Toolkit installed folder.
• Add below two paths to the system ‘PATH’ environment variable (if CUDA Toolkit installation didn’t add it):
  • C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v8.0\lib\x64
  • C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v8.0\extras\CUPTI\libx64
• Ensure below three environment variables are available with value C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v8.0 or wherever the CUDA toolkit is installed. Create the missing variables.
  • CUDA_HOME - this needs to be added manually
  • CUDA_PATH - this is usually created after installing CUDA Toolkit 8.0
  • CUDA_PATH_V8_0 - this is usually created after installing CUDA Toolkit 8.0
• Installing tensorflow-gpu
  • If tensorflow package without gpu support is installed, uninstall it.
  • Install tensorflow-gpu using pip install tensorflow-gpu OR conda install tensorflow-gpu (if using anaconda). If already installed, uninstall it and then reinstall. It didn’t work for me until I reinstalled.
• If tflearn is required, install it with one of the below commands
  • pip install tflearn
  • conda install -c derickl tflearn

You can find the official tensorflow documentation guide for tensorflow-gpu setup here.