These instructions are for installing the Ubuntu packages that contain the necessary drivers and libraries for Nvidia and OpenCL. I prefer doing it this way over the ones provided by Nvidia because it makes installation and/or cleanup a lot easier. However, you won't end up with the latest driver and toolkit. For reference I did this with Ubuntu server release14.04 LTS and an Nvidia GTX 780.
Step 1: Get the Nvidia driver
Use the following command to have the packaged driver for your GPU listed.
Use the non-updates versions.
sudo ubuntu-drivers devices
Then install the driver:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-<version here>
It should look like this for example.
Reference
sudo apt-get install nvidia-331
Step 2: Get more Nvidia driver packages
Not quite sure what the following packages are for, but you need them for this to work.
Reference
sudo apt-get install nvidia-<version here>-uvm nvidia-opencl-dev nvidia-modprobe
Step 3: Get the toolkit
Easiest step here. I know it says cuda, but it includes OpenCL libraries too:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit
getPlatformIDs returns -1001
For me this was resolved by applying step 2, but I saw people getting this error for other reasons. See
here and
here
Next steps
Run
nvidia-smi to confirm that the driver was installed correctly. Next build and run the deviceQuery sample to ensure you can build and run OpenCL programs successfully.
