GLIBC error for RHEL, Centos clusters

[trungnt13]

After I tried all possible way to get Tensorflow work on my cluster, I re-open the issue according to this: #110

First, bazel require GLIBC 2.14, 3 issues came up, however, no solution or idea for the problem is proposed.
bazelbuild/bazel#583
bazelbuild/bazel#590
bazelbuild/bazel#585

And some issues reported on Tensorflow:
#462
#53
#177

I want to emphasize that the issue is more hopeless for clusters' users, a large amount of services with old Centos remains, and it is impossible to update GLIBC on server.

I asked admin for others way around, and this is his response:

I have made some progress in installing Tensorflow, but it turned out that the version of glibc installed on Cluster is not new enough.
The version 0.1.1 of bazel checks the version of glibc during installation process and exits with an error that glibc 2.14 is not available.
The version 0.1.0 of bazel builds successfully, but later it turns out that Tensorflow requires even newer version glibc: 2.16.
Moreover, Glibc is very difficult, practically impossible, to install to a non-standard location, so I'm afraid that we cannot help with that either.

I can confirm that we should never try to build our own GLIBC, you cannot even type 'ls' or 'cd' on server. Hence, the only hope is from tensorflow team support.

Best Regards.

[weijianwen]

Similar issues arise on my cluster where multiple versions of GCC/glibcxx co-exist. Hard-coded /usr/bin/gcc and /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 doesn't make sense. By far, there seems to be no way to fix the GLIBCXX issues on CentOS/RHEL 6.x.

[ttrouill]

Have a look here and there:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/34897674/1990516
http://stackoverflow.com/a/34900471/1990516

[weijianwen]

We made some porogress on making bazel to work on RHEL/CentOS 6.x .

bazelbuild/bazel#760 (comment)

[girving]

@martinwicke: Any progress on this?

[martinwicke]

Is this still an issue? If it isn't we'll close it here. There may be a bazel issue which should be tracked elsewhere.

[aselle]

Automatically closing due to lack of activity.

[martinwicke]

I believe the latest is that this is blocked on bazel. Not sure there's much we can do from the TensorFlow side. Have you tried building with cmake?

[Montmorency]

I had GLIBC Errors of this sort and wrote some notes on installing TensorFlow from source on Scientific Linux Cluster without root privilege.

[KrnTneja]

I had the same problem when I installed TesnsorFlow using pip in CentOS 6.7 cluster. But using Miniconda, I directly install using 'conda install tensorflow' and it works.

[xujc]

Thank you so much! I am trying to install and run TensorFlow in an old Red Hat 4.4.7-1 cluster for over a week and can not success due to the glibc problem. Now conda install tensorflow solved my problem. @KrnTneja

[seldas]

I tried another way:
(1) install a newer version of Glibc (like 2.18) on the system

(2) run Python3 by specifying the LD_library and interpreter like this;
/path/to/glibc/2.18/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --library-path /path/to/glibc/2.18/lib:/path/to/other/lib which python3

(3) import tensorflow in Python.
So far it sometimes has other issues like not supporting ssl very well (may due to library issue?), but in terms of tensorflow, it works!

[nikolayvoronchikhin]

Thank you for this thread. conda install tensorflow solved my problem for RHEL 6.x, after creating a new Conda environment.

[saraswat]

Why did 'conda install tensorflow' not make the front page of the New York Times???? I just spent four days wrestling with building bazel, getting a new version of gcc, figuring out I needed to upgrade binutils, and still running into an assembler problem with the code in boringssl.
So kudos to whoever made this work -- and please advertise this more broadly!

[TheMoakMan]

I've tried installing tensorflow with conda install tensorflow but when I import it I get the same GLIBC_XX not found issue. For me its 2.16 and my system CENTOS6 is on glibc2.12