You do not need to read any of those Intel MKL guides - they are for the developers who compile the dependencies (me in this case). You as a user only need to

You do not need to read any of those Intel MKL guides - they are for the developers who compile the dependencies (me in this case). You as a user only need to have Intel's .so files on your PATH (or dylib for Mac or dll for Windows), and that's all. As this is a discussion about ClojureCUDA, I'll just note that to use this you'd need to install CUDA. IMHO, Intel MKL is easier to install than CUDA, and noone complains of the CUDA installation complexity. I understand your concerns, but I'd like to encourage you - it is really not difficult once you follow the installation instructions to the letter.