building-nvcaffe.md

Building nvcaffe

A special branch of caffe is used on TX1 which includes support for FP16.
The code is released in NVIDIA's caffe repo in the experimental/fp16 branch, located here:

https://github.com/nvidia/caffe/tree/experimental/fp16

1. Installing Dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev cmake git libboost-thread1.55-dev libgflags-dev libgoogle-glog-dev libhdf5-dev libatlas-dev libatlas-base-dev libatlas3-base liblmdb-dev libleveldb-dev

The Snappy package needs a symbolic link created for Caffe to link correctly:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libsnappy.so.1 /usr/lib/libsnappy.so
$ sudo ldconfig

2. Clone nvcaffe fp16 branch

$ git clone -b experimental/fp16 https://github.com/NVIDIA/caffe

This will checkout the repo to a local directory called caffe on your Jetson.

3. Setup build options

$ cd caffe
$ cp Makefile.config.example Makefile.config

Enable FP16:

$ sed -i 's/# NATIVE_FP16/NATIVE_FP16/g' Makefile.config

Enable cuDNN:

$ sed -i 's/# USE_CUDNN/USE_CUDNN/g' Makefile.config

Enable compute_53/sm_53:

$ sed -i 's/-gencode arch=compute_50,code=compute_50/-gencode arch=compute_53,code=sm_53 -gencode arch=compute_53,code=compute_53/g' Makefile.config

4. Compiling nvcaffe

$ make all
$ make test

5. Testing nvcaffe

$ make runtest