thank you, dirk. this was a very good explanation--and thank you for having made the binaries available to us. mint is based on ubuntu and shares its repositories. it's really the same basic OS, just an old-stylish desktop GUI. to summarize the most critical part of your response for the google search, the way to check whether atlas is installed (short of just benchmarking it and seeing the speed up) were your lines
$ ls -l /usr/lib/libblas.so.3 /etc/alternatives/libblas.so.3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 38 Jun 23 18:08 /etc/alternatives/libblas.so.3 -> /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas/libblas.so.3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 30 May 24 10:23 /usr/lib/libblas.so.3 -> /etc/alternatives/libblas.so.3 and the first line indeed shows that I am now using libatlas. grin. elegant mechanism, actually, but a little obscure when one does not know it. the speedup for me is spectacular. on simon urbanek's R-benchmark-25, my time goes from 30.3 sec to 9.6 sec on an i7-2660k. and watching my CPU usage with top, this seems to be the single-threaded version of atlas, too. is it possible and/or would it make sense to add libatlas as a dependency for r-base in the ubuntu .deb package, so that it is automatically installed, too? novices won't realize how they can speed up R so easily, and experts can easily override it with their own choice library. libatlas can be assumed to be in the ubuntu repository. would there be a serious drawback that I am not realizing? this is of course for the general public's sake--I now know how to do this and check this. regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch ([email protected]) _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
