Windows Environment Variables

If you are building the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on your own machine, it requires the installation of several external components. The build process finds these installed components on your machine through environment variables. This allows you to install these components according to your wishes and preferences.

This page lists the environment variables which are used by the CNTK build process. It also lists the preferred location for these components. The preferred location is mirroring the configuration of our internal automated build and test machines. The preferred location is also the location used in the Wiki to describe the installation process. In the script in the script driven installation. But as was said before, this is only the preferred location, you can adjust it to your liking.

Environment Variable	Preferred Location
BOOST_INCLUDE_PATH	c:\local\boost_1_60_0-msvc-14.0	BOOST (required)
BOOST_LIB_PATH	c:\local\boost_1_60_0-msvc-14.0\lib64-msvc-14.0	BOOST (required)
CNTK_MKL_PATH	c:\local\CNTKCustomMKL	Custom MKL for CNTK (required)
CUB_PATH	c:\local\cub-1.4.1	NVIDIA CUB Library (required for GPU build)
CUDNN_PATH	C:\local\cudnn-8.0-v5.1\cuda	NVIDIA cuDNN (required for GPU build)
CUDA_PATH	C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v8.0	NVIDIA CUDA (required for GPU build)
CUDA_PATH_V8_0	C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v8.0	NVIDIA CUDA (required for GPU build)
OPENCV_PATH_V31	c:\local\Opencv3.1.0\build	OpenCV (required for ImagerReader build)
PROTOBUF_PATH	c:\local\protobuf-3.1.0-vs15	Protobuf Library (required)
SWIG_PATH	C:\local\swigwin-3.0.10	SWIG (required)
ZLIB_PATH	c:\local\zlib-vs15	Compression Library (required for ImagerReader build)

In a command shell you could use these commands to set the environment variables on your machine:

setx  BOOST_INCLUDE_PATH c:\local\boost_1_60_0-msvc-14.0
setx  BOOST_LIB_PATH c:\local\boost_1_60_0-msvc-14.0\lib64-msvc-14.0
setx  CNTK_MKL_PATH c:\local\CNTKCustomMKL
setx  CUB_PATH c:\local\cub-1.4.1
setx  CUDNN_PATH C:\local\cudnn-8.0-v5.1\cuda
setx  OPENCV_PATH_V31 c:\local\Opencv3.1.0\build
setx  PROTOBUF_PATH c:\local\protobuf-3.1.0-vs15
setx  SWIG_PATH c:\local\swigwin-3.0.10
setx  ZLIB_PATH c:\local\zlib-vs15

The CUDA_PATH and CUDA_PATH_V8_0 environment variables shouldn't be changed by you directly. The NVIDIA CUDA installer is defining these variables directly.

There are several additional environment variables which can be used to define the CNTK features you build on your system. If you don't have these environment variables set on your system, the default value is assumed.

Environment Variable	Default value
CNTK_ENABLE_ASGD	true	Data Parallel ASGD
CNTK_ENABLE_1BITSGD	false	1bit SGD
CNTK_PY27_PATH		Path to the CNTK Python 2.7 environment
CNTK_PY34_PATH		Path to the CNTK Python 3.4 environment
CNTK_PY35_PATH		Path to the CNTK Python 3.5 environment
CNTK_PY36_PATH		Path to the CNTK Python 3.6 environment

Assuming the defaul values:

• DataParallel ASGD is being built
• 1bit SGD is not being built
• With undefined CNTK_PY.._PATH, Python libraries are not being built

More information

• Setup CNTK on your machine