Markus Dittrich wrote: > On Tue, 10 Jul 2007, Adam Pityszek wrote: >> Hi All, > >> I am forwarding my email to Sebastien regarding the merging of blas- and >> cblas-reference into one package. Sebastien accepted this idea, but we >> would like to hear your opinions as well, since you are the real users >> of scientific libraries in Gentoo. > >> BR, >> /Adam > > > This sounds like a fine plan to me, particularly since most > blas implementations in portage do provide both blas and cblas > at the same time. In addition, this would render the eselect framework > less complicated which I find desirable. > > cheers, > Markus > > > -- Markus Dittrich (markusle) > Gentoo Linux Developer > Scientific applications
I think the general scenario for users of BLAS and LAPACK is that they will be happy with this. However, some people, especially in the high-performance area, will want to be able to benchmark various versions (ATLAS, GOTO or chip-specific Intel/AMD) and either static-link to the winner or dynamic-link to the winner on an individual calling application basis. I haven't gotten around to doing that yet, but it's on my list for my AMD64 dual-core system. I'm not sure the "eselect" facility provides for this. And a number of packages carry their own BLAS or LAPACK. R is one of them; in fact 1. R allows you to build a shared library of the BLAS and LAPACK that it carries, and 2. The R team strongly suggests using the LAPACK that R carries rather than an external one, and indeed, the "make check-all" tests fail on some architectures with some external versions of LAPACK. On my Athlon T-Bird, this happened with the Gentoo lapack-atlas and the R team slapped me silly when I complained about it on their mailing list. ;) So as long as I can do all of these things: 1. Choose between static and dynamic linking to BLAS/LAPACK with a USE flag on any application that allows such a choice, 2. Choose between internal BLAS/LAPACK with a USE flag on any application that allows such a choice, and 3. Choose between the various versions for the highest performance on an individual application basis I'm happy. I think most of the ebuilds are already set up this way, but again, I haven't had a chance to test with really big problems on my really big machine yet. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
