ELL enables you to design and deploy intelligent machine-learned models onto single-board computers, like Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Most of your interaction with ELL occurs on a laptop or desktop computer, rather than the single-board machine itself. The steps below describe how to build ELL on a laptop or desktop running Ubuntu Linux. Note, following instructions are only for Bionic Beaver (18.04). You can also use scripts/SETUP-Ubuntu.sh
to setup your computer.
The instructions below assume that ELL was obtained from https://github.com/Microsoft/ELL using git. The git scm client is typically installed by default on Ubuntu systems, but if it isn't, open a terminal and type
sudo apt-get install -y git
To clone the ELL repository, type
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/ELL.git
There is a docker image already setup with all the pre-requisites for building and running ELL. This image was built using this Dockerfile.
Ubuntu provides the Advanced Packaging Tool apt
for downloading and installing prerequisites. First, make sure that apt
is up to date by running:
sudo apt-get -y update
ELL requires the following tools and libraries, some of which are installed by default on Ubuntu systems:
- GCC 8 or newer - C++17 compiler
- CMake version 3.8 or newer - build system
- libedit and zlib libraries
Note that GCC 8 may not be available by default. It can be found in ubuntu-toolchain-r/test PPA.
To add ubuntu-toolchain-r/test PPA and update sources, type
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get -y update
Optionally, ELL can take advantage of these additional tools:
- OpenBLAS - version 0.2.19.3 - fast linear algebra. This is optional but can make models execute up to 10 times faster.
- Doxygen - version 1.8.13 - this is optional, it is used to generate nice code documentation for the ELL API.
To install all of the above, type
sudo apt-get install -y gcc-8 g++-8 cmake libedit-dev zlibc zlib1g zlib1g-dev make
sudo apt-get install -y libopenblas-dev doxygen
ELL depends on the LLVM compiler framework, version 8.0. To install it use this command
sudo sh -c 'echo deb http://apt.llvm.org/bionic/ llvm-toolchain-bionic-8 main >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo sh -c 'echo deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/bionic/ llvm-toolchain-bionic-8 main >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
wget -O - https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install llvm-8 -y
This works on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver. If you have some other Linux version then LLVM has more instructions on how to install it manually.
curl
is a command line tool used to transfer data via URL. When files are required to be downloaded from a URL, the instructions assume you have curl
available to perform the download. To install curl
, type the following:
sudo apt-get install -y curl
SWIG is a tool that generates Python interfaces to C++ libraries. If you intend to use ELL from Python, you must install SWIG version 4.0.0. At the time of writing this document, apt-get
doesn't yet have the latest version of SWIG
, so it must be installed manually
curl -O --location http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/swig/swig-4.0.0.tar.gz
tar zxvf swig-4.0.0.tar.gz && cd swig-4.0.0
./configure --without-pcre && make && sudo make install
ELL can optionally be used from Python 3.6. An easy way to install Python and all the required modules is with Miniconda. Download and install Miniconda from here https://conda.io/miniconda.html.
After installing Miniconda, create a Python 3.6 environment and include the numpy
module by typing
conda create -n py36 numpy python=3.6
Next, activate the environment you just created by typing
source activate py36
You need to repeat this activation command each time you open a new terminal and intend to use ELL from Python. Also, make sure to activate the py36
environment before building ELL, to ensure that Python interfaces are created.
OpenCV is a library that helps with capturing and preprocessing images. To install OpenCV in the current Python environment, type
conda install -c conda-forge opencv -y
You can build ELL by using CMake to create a makefile, invoking that makefile, and optionally building Python interfaces. If you intend to build Python interfaces, make sure to activate the py36
miniconda environment as described above.
In the repository root directory, create a build
subdirectory and change to that directory.
mkdir build
cd build
Invoke CMake by typing
cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/g++-8 -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/gcc-8 -DONNX=ON ..
Don't forget the two dots (..) at the end of the command! This creates a makefile for the project. Next, invoke the makefile by typing
make
Optionally, build Python interfaces by typing
make _ELL_python
The generated executables will appear in ELL/build/bin
.
You can test that the python interface is working by running the following test:
ctest . --build-config release -R ell-python-interface-test
The instructions above are enough to start using ELL. For more advanced topics, like testing and generating documentation, please see our advanced installation instructions.