On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Jan Blechta <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2015 12:59:16 +0000
> "Garth N. Wells" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to use Hashdist to build FEniCS inside a Docker container.
>> I have a few comments and questions:
>>
>>  - The script at http://fenicsproject.org/fenics-install.sh takes an
>> incredibly long time to run because it builds *so* many libraries,
>> e.g. do we really need to be building openssl, freetype, zlib,
>> libtiff, libxml2, sqlite, ncurses, png, etc?
>>
>> - Can I skip building the loads of libraries that I can get as
>> binaries from my package manager?
>>
>> - Building ParMETIS, SCOTCH, MUMPS, etc, and then configuring with
>> PETSc is guaranteed to end in tears (there has already been a bug
>> report). PETSc should download and configure these because PETSc picks
>> (and sometimes patches) compatible versions. If PETSc doesn't do the
>> picking, then solvers will seg fault.
>>
>> - If the objective is a consistent 'stack', then using a Linux
>> container is a better approach.
>>
>> - For decent performance, the Hashdist installer should install an
>> optimised BLAS library, not reference BLAS.
>
> Really? I don't think that BLAS level 3 is used anywhere than in
> manipulation with frontal matrices by MUMPS, UMFPACK. BLAS level 2 does
> not apply to sparse matvecs and level 1 for vector axpys should have
> essentially no impact.
>

For most users, most time will be spent in the LU solver, the
performance of which has a strong dependency on the BLAS
implementation. When testing some time ago, I observed that the
difference in time can be several factors.

PETSc performance is also affected by the BLAS implementation.

Garth

> Jan
>
>>
>> - While writing this message, Hashdist has crashed on petsc4py:
>>
>>  File
>> "/home/garth/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Cython-0.21-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/Cython/Compiler/Main.py",
>> line 22, in <module> 2015/02/19 12:56:05 - INFO:
>> [package:run_job]     from .Scanning import PyrexScanner,
>> FileSourceDescriptor 2015/02/19 12:56:05 - INFO: [package:run_job]
>> ImportError: 
>> /home/garth/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Cython-0.21-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/Cython/Compiler/Scanning.so:
>> undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_DecodeUTF8
>> 2015/02/19 12:56:05 - ERROR: [package:run_job] Command '[u'/bin/bash',
>> '_hashdist/build.sh']' returned non-zero exit status 1
>> 2015/02/19 12:56:05 - ERROR: [package:run_job] command failed
>> (code=1); raising
>>
>> Garth
>> _______________________________________________
>> fenics mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics
>
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