CLBlast: Building and installing

This document describes how to compile, link, and install CLBlast on various platforms. You can either use a pre-built package or compile the library from source. For other information about CLBlast, see the main README.

Requirements

The pre-requisites for compilation of CLBlast are kept as minimal as possible. A basic compilation infrastructure is all you need, no external dependencies are required. You'll need:

CMake version 2.8.10 or higher
A C++11 compiler, for example:
- GCC 4.7.0 or newer
- Clang 3.3 or newer
- AppleClang 5.0 or newer
- ICC 14.0 or newer
- MSVC (Visual Studio) 2013 or newer
An OpenCL 1.1 or newer library, for example:
- Apple OpenCL
- NVIDIA CUDA SDK
- AMD APP SDK
- Intel OpenCL
- Beignet
- Mesa Clover
- ARM Mali OpenCL
- Vivante OpenCL
- POCL

Using pre-built packages

There are pre-built binaries available for Ubuntu, Debian, macOS, and Windows.

CLBlast is in Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) and Debian 11 (Bullseye) and later, and can be installed with:

sudo apt install libclblast-dev

This may not be the latest version of CLBlast. The latest should be available in Debian unstable, or can be built from source as described below.

Users of older versions of Ubuntu can use this PPA.

For Arch Linux and Manjaro, CLBlast is available as a package maintained by a 3rd party.

For OS X / macOS, CLBlast is available through Homebrew. It can be installed as follows:

brew update
brew install clblast

For Windows, binaries are provided in a .zip file on Github as part of the CLBlast release page.

Linux / macOS compilation from source

Configuration can be done using CMake. On Linux and macOS systems with make, building is straightforward. Here's an example of an out-of-source build using a command-line compiler and make (starting from the root of the CLBlast folder):

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install  # (optional)

A custom installation folder can be specified when calling CMake:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/directory ..

Building a static version of the library instead of shared one (.dylib/.so) can be done by disabling the BUILD_SHARED_LIBS option when calling CMake. For example:

cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF ..

In case you run into segfaults with OpenCL programs (known to happen with the AMD APP), you can try the following (thanks to kpot):

Use -fPIC or its analogue when compiling. In CMake you can do this by adding set(CMAKE_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE ON) to the project config.
Forbid CMake to add RPATH entries to binaries. You can do this project-wise with set(CMAKE_SKIP_BUILD_RPATH ON) in CMake.

Windows compilation from source

When using Visual Studio 2015, the project-files can be generated as follows:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 Win64" ..

For another version, replace 14 with the appropriate version (12 for VS 2013, 15 for VS 2017). To generate a static version of the library instead of a .dll, specify -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF when running cmake.

Android compilation from source

For deployment on Android, there are three options to consider.

First of all, you can use Google's recommended route of installing Android Studio with the NDK, and then use the JNI to interface to the CLBlast library. For this, we refer to the official Android Studio documentation and the online tutorials.

Alternatively, you can cross-compile the library and the test/client/tuner executables directly. To do so, first install the NDK, then find your vendor's OpenCL library (e.g. in /system/vendor/lib), get OpenCL headers from the Khronos registry, and invoke CMake as follows:

cmake .. \
 -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME=Android \
 -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION=19 \             # Set the appropriate Android API level
 -DCMAKE_ANDROID_ARCH_ABI=armeabi-v7a \  # Set the appropriate device architecture (e.g. armeabi-v7a or arm64-v8a)
 -DCMAKE_ANDROID_NDK=$ANDROID_NDK_PATH \ # Assumes $ANDROID_NDK_PATH points to your NDK installation
 -DCMAKE_ANDROID_STL_TYPE=gnustl_static \
 -DOPENCL_ROOT=/path/to/vendor/OpenCL/lib/folder/   # Should contain libOpenCL.so and CL/cl.h

For any potential issues, first check cmath 'has not been declared' errors. Also, if you are encountering errors such as #error Bionic header ctype.h does not define either _U nor _CTYPE_U, make sure CMake is not including system paths.

Finally, a third option is to use the Collective Knowledge framework in combination with the NDK, e.g. as follows:

sudo pip install ck
ck pull repo:ck-math
ck install package:lib-clblast-master-universal --target_os=android21-arm64

Compiling CLBlast with a CUDA back-end

There is also a CUDA API of CLBlast available. Enabling this compiles the whole library for CUDA and thus replaces the OpenCL API. It is based upon the CUDA runtime and NVRTC APIs, requiring NVIDIA CUDA 7.5 or higher. The CUDA version of the library can be used as follows after providing the -DCUDA=ON -DOPENCL=OFF flags to CMake:

#include <clblast_cuda.h>

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