Performance Note ================ Don't use the default BLAS as long as possible. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=898941 Why do We Link Caffe Against libblas.so.3 ? =========================================== Well this is neither accidental nor awkward. This is due to a Debian feature called `alternatives`. (So does Ubuntu) `libblas.so.3` is a symbol link, you can make it point to either `atlas` or `openblas` without rebuilding Caffe. See what's your current selection of libblas.so.3 : $ sudo update-alternatives --get-selections | grep libblas If you want to switch the BLAS lib from basic BLAS library to atlas or openblas, first install your favorate one $ sudo apt install libopenblas-dev OR $ sudo apt install libatlas-dev then update the alternatives: $ sudo update-alternatives --config libblas.so.3 $ sudo update-alternatives --config libblas.so Finally you run Caffe again. Is it faster as you expected? For more detail pleese see update-alternatives(8). Notes for Package Maintainer ============================ 1. Testing whether the program works, apart from the gtest test programs? $ caffe time -model examples/mnist/lenet.prototxt or with gpu $ caffe time -model examples/mnist/lenet.prototxt -gpu 0 Well, testing caffe in this way (using deploy version of network) requires no dataset, which may be useful for some maintainers who are not familiar with Caffe. If you want to test Caffe on some real dataset e.g. MNIST, you can take a closer look at `examples/mnist/readme.md`.