Hello everybody, I have just implemented my first project in Julia on a 64 bit system. I re-implemented a C program and even after optimizing my code using the profiler I can only reach roughly half of its speed. Most of the CPU time is spend in methods from the Base.LinAlg.BLAS module. Playing around with these functions, I noticed that there is a huge difference (roughly factor 2) depending on whether my input to BLAS is Float32 or Float64 (which is obviously the slower one). Particularly I am referring to the axpy! function. Since I am on a 64 bit system, every float that I directly specify (x = 1.0) will be a Float64 by default, and therefore, converting every float variable to Float32 will mess up my code considerably. >From reading the mailing list and the github issues I have the impression that I can't simply set a Flag on my 64 bit system to compile Julia in 32 bit mode.
Is there any way to make floats in Julia default to 32 bit on a 64 bit system? At least in a lot of my work 32 bit precision is just fine and the speed I could potentially gain by simply switching is enormous. Thank you in advance. Best, Hubert
