Building Caffe on Windows with CUDA 9.0 for VS 2013, 2015 and 2017

Building Caffe on Windows 10 has been a journey (to put it lightly). Since I have a new gen gfx card (new for 2018), it does not support CUDA 8.0. So, all posts saying you need CUDA 8.0 are outdated (at least to me). With CUDA 9.0, Windows caffe does not compile.

The good news after a couple of days of trying I’ve figured out a workaround. The only boost version that supports CUDA 9.0 as of now is boost 1.65.1 and above. But, interestingly cmake breaks with boost 1.66.0. I know, welcome to the real-world versioning hell when it comes to actually building stuff.

So, if you got your windows source from: https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/windows

You need to do a couple of stuff. First download and install boost 1.65.1 in some path. Let’s call this root directory my_boost_1_65_1 (typically C:\local\boost_1_65_1), and the library directory (which changes based upon which VS version you downloaded, typically C:\local\boost_1_65_1\lib64-msvc-14.0 for VS 2015). Yes, it sucks that MSVC version is 14.0 for VS 2015, but such is the life living in a Microsoft world.

I assume you have checked out the 1.0 version of windows caffe. Now, open the build_windows.cmd in the scripts directory, and modify the cmake command as follows (note the 3 lines referring to boost and boost paths):

cmake -G"!CMAKE_GENERATOR!" ^
-DBLAS=Open ^
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=%CMAKE_CONFIG% ^
-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=%CMAKE_BUILD_SHARED_LIBS% ^
-DBUILD_python:BOOL=%BUILD_PYTHON% ^
-DBUILD_python_layer:BOOL=%BUILD_PYTHON_LAYER% ^
-DBUILD_matlab:BOOL=%BUILD_MATLAB% ^
-DCPU_ONLY:BOOL=%CPU_ONLY% ^
-DCOPY_PREREQUISITES:BOOL=1 ^
-DINSTALL_PREREQUISITES:BOOL=1 ^
-DUSE_NCCL:BOOL=!USE_NCCL! ^
-DCUDA_ARCH_NAME:STRING=%CUDA_ARCH_NAME% ^
-DBOOST_NO_BOOST_CMAKE=TRUE ^
-DBOOST_ROOT=C:/boost_1_65_1 ^
-DBOOST_LIBRARYDIR=C:/boost_1_65_1/lib64-msvc-14.0 ^
"%~dp0\.."


I do the following edit as well, so I know that boost version is correct or it will fail. So, edit the boost version in Dependencies.cmake (located in the cmake directory):


# ---[ Boost
find_package(Boost 1.65 REQUIRED COMPONENTS system thread filesystem)
list(APPEND Caffe_INCLUDE_DIRS PUBLIC ${Boost_INCLUDE_DIRS})
list(APPEND Caffe_DEFINITIONS PUBLIC -DBOOST_ALL_NO_LIB)
list(APPEND Caffe_LINKER_LIBS PUBLIC ${Boost_LIBRARIES})


And, by changing these two files, everything should be good. Now, execute scripts\build-windows.cmd and watch your build succeed.


l_prerequisites.vcxproj]
CUSTOMBUILD : warning : cannot resolve item 'api-ms-win-crt-heap-l1-1-0.dll' [D:\tools\caffe\build\tools\upgrade_solver_proto_text_install_prerequisites.vcxproj]
CUSTOMBUILD : -- warning : gp_resolved_file_type non-absolute file 'api-ms-win-crt-heap-l1-1-0.dll' returning type 'system' -- possibly incorrect [D:\tools\caffe\build\tools\upgrade_solver_proto_text_install_
prerequisites.vcxproj]
CUSTOMBUILD : warning : cannot resolve item 'api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll' [D:\tools\caffe\build\tools\upgrade_solver_proto_text_install_prerequisites.vcxproj]
CUSTOMBUILD : -- warning : gp_resolved_file_type non-absolute file 'api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll' returning type 'system' -- possibly incorrect [D:\tools\caffe\build\tools\upgrade_solver_proto_text_install
_prerequisites.vcxproj]
CUSTOMBUILD : warning : cannot resolve item 'api-ms-win-crt-convert-l1-1-0.dll' [D:\tools\caffe\build\tools\upgrade_solver_proto_text_install_prerequisites.vcxproj]
CUSTOMBUILD : -- warning : gp_resolved_file_type non-absolute file 'api-ms-win-crt-convert-l1-1-0.dll' returning type 'system' -- possibly incorrect [D:\tools\caffe\build\tools\upgrade_solver_proto_text_insta
ll_prerequisites.vcxproj]

6897 Warning(s)
0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:14:44.49

Let me know in the comments if you run into more issues.