Installing NuPIC on Ubuntu 32bit

Engineering NuPIC
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Introduction

Nupic doesn’t officially support 32 bit installation. However, with some extra steps, it can currently be built on 32bit. Although all the tests may not run.

These guidelines were taken from a recent discussion on the mailing list.

Be warned that these may go out out of date at any point. Think of them as notes on what worked for others, not as definitive instructions.

Follow the other instructions

First step would be to follow the first two sections of the main instructions for installing nupic on Ubuntu.

  1. Update apt-get
  2. Install Required Packages

Make sure that GCC is version 4.7 or greater and you have installed swig

Get NuPIC

In the other instructions nupic was built on its own, and during that process nupic.core is also downloaded and built. However here these are build separately. More information about the relationship between the two can be found here: https://github.com/numenta/nupic/wiki/NuPIC's-Dependency-on-nupic.core.

Clone and Build nupic.core

These instructions are taken from the link above. For more information about building nupic.core look in the README at https://github.com/numenta/nupic.core

First clone the repo from https://github.com/numenta/nupic.core. Then

mkdir -p nupic.core/build/scripts
cd nupic.core/build/scripts
cmake ../../src -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../release -DPY_EXTENSIONS_DIR=../../bindings/py/nupic/bindings
make -j4
make install

If this works you can run the nupic.core tests mentioned in nupic.core’s README.

cd $NUPIC_CORE/build/scripts
make tests_htm 
make tests_unit

Clone and Build NuPIC

There is no difference here to the main instructions. Follow the sections:

  1. Clone The NupiC Repo
  2. Set The NuPIC Environment Variable
  3. Install The Required Python Modules
  4. Build NuPIC (follow the 32 bit section)

Now hopefully it should build properly and everything will work.

However

  • When tested on Ubuntu 14.04, there was an error in building: Runtime Error: module compiled against API version 9 but this version of numpy is 7. Turns ubunutu comes with numpy 1.8 already installed (ie the apt-get package python-numpy) but the instructions above say to pip install numpy version 1.7. This seems to cause the error. Running pip uninstall numpy to get rid of version 1.7 and revert back to ubuntu’s version 1.8 fixes the issue.
  • Also only the first set of tests make tests_pyhtm ran. All others failed.
  • But the hotgym demos still run. So there is still some functionality