OpenCL is standard for cross-platform hardware-independent parallel programming: http://ww.khronos.com/opencl/ Currently Debian only provides NVIDIA OpenCL implementation of OpenCL libraries: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl.html which is using CUDA technology: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpucomputing.html This is reason why this package depends on NVIDIA proprietary code. Error in function dlGetPlatformIDs means that there is no OpenCL implementation available on the system. Current OpenCL packaging in Debian assumes that there can be many different OpenCL implementations present on the system. Each implementation is supposed to provide package opencl-icd (Installable Client Driver) which will allow for client software to chose OpenCL library to run. As soon as there is more OpenCL implementations in Debian dependencies of this package will be changed.