Installing cuDNN for Theano without root access

Question

Can I install cuDNN locally without root access ?

I don't have root access to a linux machine I am using (the distro is openSuse), but I have CUDA 7.5 already installed.

I am using Theano and I need cuDNN to improve the speed of the operations on the GPU.

I downloaded cudnn-7.5-linux-x64-v5.1 from Nvidia and as per the instructions I need to copy the CuDNN archive content to CUDA installation folder, i.e. (cuda/lib64/ and cuda/include/). But that would require me to have root access.

Is it possible that I extract the cudnn archive locally and provide theano with the path to the cudnn library ?

Answer 1

You could copy the entire CUDA SDK to your home and tell Theano and others that they should use your local copy of CUDA by adding/modifying these environment variables in your ~/.bashrc

export CUDA_ROOT=~/program/cuda-7.5
export CUDA_HOME=~/program/cuda-7.5
export PATH=${CUDA_HOME}/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib64/nvidia:${CUDA_HOME}/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Then you could simply extract cuDNN to your local CUDA SDK dir ~/program/cuda-7.5/