Install BLAS Library for MXNet

Posted on 08 Nov 2015, tagged deep learningprogrammingmxnetmac os x

MXNet is a deep learning library. I read its doc and some of its source code. It looks very good. So I’d like to install and try it. While I’m following the installing guide to install it on Mac OS X, it failed to compile with the error cblas.h not found. The message pointed out I may miss the BLAS library.

After some search, I find Mac OS X seems to come with its default BLAS library. But I cannot find its headers. And as an article said, the default BLAS library may not as fast as some third party ones. So I install OpenBLAS with homebrew:

1brew install openblas

It is installed under /usr/local/opt/openblas, so we need to change these lines in the MXNet’s config.mk (it should be copied from make/osx.mk as the installing guide specified) :

1# the additional link flags you want to add
2ADD_LDFLAGS = '-L/usr/local/opt/openblas/lib'
3
4# the additional compile flags you want to add
5ADD_CFLAGS = '-I/usr/local/opt/openblas/include'

Then the compile should pass.