Setup CNTK on your machine

The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) supports both 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux platforms. Upon completing the installation, you can test your installation from Python or try the tutorials or examples section of the documentation.

It is recommended you install CNTK from precompiled binaries. If you want to build CNTK from source code, the required steps are described here.

Install CNTK from Precompiled Binaries

To install the latest precompiled binaries to your machine, follow the instructions here:

Windows	Linux
Python-only installation Simple pip install of CNTK lib for use in Python	Python-only installation Simple pip install of CNTK lib for use in Python
Script-driven installation Script that installs CNTK Python lib and CNTK.exe for BrainScript	Script-driven installation Script that installs CNTK Python lib and CNTK.exe for BrainScript
Manual installation Manually install CNTK Python lib, CNTK.exe for BrainScript, and dependencies	Manual installation Manually install CNTK Python lib,CNTK.exe for BrainScript, and dependencies
	Docker installation

CNTK Versions: CPU and GPU

CNTK offers two different build versions. The CPU-only build uses the optimized Intel MKLML; MKLML is released with Intel MKL-DNN as a trimmed version of Intel MKL for MKL-DNN. The GPU implementation uses highly optimized NVIDIA libraries (such as CUB and cuDNN) and supports distributed training across multiple GPUs and multiple machines. The GPU build also includes the MSR-developed 1bit-quantized SGD and block-momentum SGD parallel training algorithms, which allow for even faster distributed training in CNTK.