Is it possible to install CNTK on a macbook?

Question

Can i install Microsoft CNTK on a macbook? I have OS X El Capitan. The official Microsoft documentation at https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/Setup-CNTK-on-your-machine does not provide any information for Mac users.

thanks

Answer 1

As of June 2017, you can only run CNTK on OSX using Docker (which will run the Linux container)

Microsoft documentation is available here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive-toolkit/CNTK-Docker-Containers

If you want to run the CNTK CPU version (unlike the GPU that is turned on), you will need to pull out a specific version of the docker container. See: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/cntk/

I recommend using the following for CNTK CPUs:

docker pull microsoft/cntk:2.0-cpu-python3.5

Once you pulled out the container above, you can use Jupyter Notebooks to view tutorials, etc .:

First run the container:

 docker run -d -p 8888:8888 --name cntk-jupyter-notebooks -t microsoft/cntk:2.0-cpu-python3.5 

Then run this command:

 docker exec -it cntk-jupyter-notebooks bash -c "source /cntk/activate-cntk && jupyter-notebook --no-browser --port=8888 --ip=0.0.0.0 --notebook-dir=/cntk/Tutorials --allow-root" 

You want to access the shell to run CNTK commands. You can connect the bash shell using docker.

Get container id

 docker ps 

Then attach the shell

 docker exec -it <container_id> bash 

Answer 2

Although it may not be supported directly on a Mac, you can always use a virtual machine to get around.

• You can configure dockers in your local environment.

  https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/

• Follow the installation documentation for Docker

  https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/CNTK-Docker-Containers

Answer 3

We currently support Linux and Windows. Mac support is on our ToDo or will be interested in community input.