Using GPU with Tensorflow.NET

This article will explains in steps how to install Tensorflow-GPU and setup with Tensorflow.NET in a C# project.

Installing Tensorflow.NET-GPU on Windows

1. Make sure your projects are targeting x64 as tensorflow does not support x32 architecture.

2. Uninstall any existing tensorflow redist packages and install one of the following:

   PM> Install-Package SciSharp.TensorFlow.Redist-Windows-GPU

   Rebuild your project, ensure that tensorflow.dll is copied to your output folder (e.g. bin/debug/tensorflow.dll or bin/debug/runtimes/win-x64/native/tensorflow.dll) and check its size.
   The .dll should be above 300MB. If it's below 150MB - it is likely to be a CPU version; delete it and rebuild the project.

3. You need to meet tensorflow-gpu's requirements.

• Check if your GPU card has with CUDA® Compute Capability 3.5 or higher. See the list of CUDA-enabled GPU cards.
• CUDA 10.0 (exactly version 10.0) installed and have the following environment variables set (the directory may vary, verify it exists)

  ::Set new environment variables:
  CUDA_PATH=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v10.0
  CUDA_PATH_V10_0=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v10.0
  ::Append To PATH:
  C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v10.0\extras\CUPTI\libx64
  C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v10.0\include
  C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v10.0\bin

• cuDNN SDK installed. Extract the zip to C:\cudann and set up the environment variable in PATH:

  ::Append to PATH:
  C:\cudann
  C:\cudann\bin

• Make sure your NVIDIA GPU driver version is >=410.x (after you've installed CUDA 10.0 as it might reinstall your current drivers).

If you've done all the above correctly, the library should automatically switch to GPU and console should print a line similar to this:

tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1326] Created TensorFlow device (/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:GPU:0 with 2114 MB memory) -> 
physical GPU (device: 0, name: GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, pci bus id: 0000:04:00.0, compute capability: 6.1)