Torch 7 Deep Learning Installation (Ubuntu 14.04)

As an alternative to Caffe framework, Torch 7, which is maintained by Facebook Research provides a more flexible framework for machine learning algorithms, especially for popular Deep Learning. Difference from the Caffe that is developed by C++ & CUDA (see here for source codes) and wrapped with multiple script language such as python and matlab, Torch 7 is developed using C & CUDA (see here for source code) under the hood while the interface is provided through LuaJIT, an easy and efficient script language.  In this post, I install the Torch 7 framework on my Ubuntu 14.04 laptop and run the basic test programs on it, using only CPU.

To find out what is Lua, you can refer this article (http://cellux.github.io/articles/introduction-to-luajit-part-1/)

Torch 7:

Website:
http://torch.ch/
Github:
https://github.com/torch/torch7


Installation Instruction:
http://torch.ch/docs/getting-started.html#_

According to this instruction:

# in a terminal, run the commands curl -sk https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torch/ezinstall/master/install-deps | bash

The first line is to install dependencies that are required for Torch 7,
Go into this bash file (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torch/ezinstall/master/install-deps), you can see that the dependencies are (part of it them listed):
OpenBLAS:  an optimized BLAS library, BLAS, called Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, provides standard building blocks for performing basic vector and matrix operations. 
gcc/g++, cmake, git, gnuplot, python, etc.

This will take several minutes (mine for 20 mins) according to your computer. 

git clone https://github.com/torch/distro.git ~/torch --recursive
cd ~/torch; ./install.sh
Second and third lines install LuaJIT, LuaRocks, and use LuaRocks to install Torch and other packages. You can see some of the packages in their github (https://github.com/torch/distro).  Torch is installed on your computer under the path: "~/torch/".

This will take several minutes (mine for ~2 min clone from git and ~15 min to install)


Nicely Done! 

After several minutes installation, you can just type:

"th" in terminal to run torch. 

Note that if it shows "th: command not found", please refresh the bashrc file by command:
"source ~/.bashrc"


Then command "th" will give you this:

Test Torch 7:
Install torch/demos  from github by command:

"git clone https://github.com/torch/demos"

Go into the demos folder, then just run one of the demos:
"th demos/train-on-cifar/train-on-cifar.lua"

Done! You will see the demo runs to train different models on the CIFAR dataset. The screenshot is like this: