How to set up a 64 bit version of NumPy on Windows

A short note on a complex topic. Feel free to shoot questions at me in the comments.

There are no official NumPy 64 bit builds available for Windows. In fact, 64 bit Windows is not officially supported by NumPy. So, if you are serious about your project, you need to either consider building on top of Unix-like platforms and inherit external quality assurance, or (on Windows) you need to anticipate issues of various kinds, and do extensive testing on your own. One of the reasons is that there is no adequate (open source, reliable, feature-rich) tool chain for creating proper 64 bit builds of NumPy on Windows (further references: numpy mailing list thread, Intel forums). Nevertheless, in many cases a working solution are the non-official builds provided by Christoph Gohlke, created with Intel’s commercial compiler suite. It is up to you to understand the license impacts and whether you want or can use these builds. I love to use these builds.

The following steps show a very simple way to get NumPy binaries for the AMD64 architecture installed on top of CPython 3(.4). These instructions are valid only for Python installed with an official CPython installer, obtained from python.org.

1) Install CPython for AMD64 arch

Download a 64 bit MSI installer file from python.org. The crucial step is to get an installer for the AMD64 (x86-64) architecture, usually called “Windows x86-64 MSI installer”. I have chosen python-3.4.2.amd64.msi. Run the setup.

2) Upgrade pip

Recent versions of Python 3 ship with pip, but you should use the newest version for proper wheel support. Open cmd.exe, and run

C:\> pip install pip --upgrade

Verify:

C:\> pip --version
pip 6.0.8 from C:\Python34\lib\site-packages (python 3.4)

The latter verifies that this pip i) is up-to-date, and ii) belongs to our target CPython version (multiple versions of CPython can be installed on any given system, and the correspondence between pip and a certain Python build is sometimes not obvious).

Note: The CPython installer should properly adjust your PATH environment variable so that python as well as pip entered at the command line correspond to what has been installed by the installer. It is however possible that you have somehow lost control of your environment by installing too many different things in an unreasonable order. In that case, you might have to manually adjust your PATH so that it priorizes the exetuables in C:\Python34\Scripts (or wherever you have installed your 64 bit Python version to).

3) Download wheel of NumPy build for AMD64 on Windows

Navigate to lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy and select a build for your Python version and for AMD64. I chose numpy‑1.9.2rc1+mkl‑cp34‑none‑win_amd64.whl.

4) Install the wheel via pip

On the command line, navigate to the directory where you have downloaded the wheel file to. Install it:

C:\Users\user\Desktop>pip install "numpy-1.9.2rc1+mkl-cp34-none-win_amd64.whl"
Processing c:\users\user\desktop\numpy-1.9.2rc1+mkl-cp34-none-win_amd64.whl
Installing collected packages: numpy
 
Successfully installed numpy-1.9.2rc1

The simplicity of this approach is kind of new. Actually, this simplicity is why wheels have been designed in the first place! Installing pre-built binaries with pip has not been possible with the “old” egg package format. So, older tutorials/descriptions of this kind might point to MSI installers or dubious self-extracting installers. These times are over now, and this is also the main reason for why I am writing this blog post.

5) Verify

>>> import numpy
>>> numpy.__version__
'1.9.2rc1'

Great.

Third-party Python distributions

I do not want to leave unmentioned that out there are very nice third party Python distributions (i.e. not provided by the Python Software Foundation) that include commercially supported and properly tested NumPy/SciPy builds for 64 bit Windows platforms. Most of these third party vendors have a commercial background, and dictate their own licenses with respect to the usage of their Python distribution. For non-commercial purposes, most of them can be used for free. The following distributions provide a working solution:

All of these three distributions are recommendable from a technical point of view (I cannot tell whether their license models / restrictions are an issue for you or not). They all come as 64 bit builds. I am not entirely sure if Enthought and ActiveState build NumPy against Intel’s Math Kernel Library. In case of Anaconda, this definitely is not the case in the free version — this is something that can be explicitly obtained, for 29 $ (it’s called the “MKL Optimizations” package).

Jan-Philip Gehrcke, PhD