Re: BLAS recommendations SUMMARY
Greetings!
"Robert G. Brown" <rgb@phy.duke.edu> writes:
> To close with a mildly political statement, I'd recommend that in cases
> where folks have energy to put into LAPACK/BLAS for linux and
> beowulfery, they should focus on open source solutions (GPL or not) as
> ATLAS appears to be and avoid the "easy" route of using binary libraries
> with uncertain licensing. If just a few folks who are interested join
> Emil in his efforts to optimize for the common processor families it is
> likely that the libraries will very rapidly become extremely good, while
> in the case of closed/proprietary libraries (however nice they may be)
> you are always at the mercy of the owners with respect to bugs and
> performance both. Remember, a beowulf is a COTS, OPEN SOURCE based
> cluster supercomputer, at least to the extent possible.
>
Just to back this up from another angle, sometime within the last year
(I can't remember exactly when), we tried the binary only ghenry blas,
and actually found it didn't pass all the scalapack tests, which were
passed with the netlib reference blas. I emailed the author with a
bug report, and got a nice reply back that he would be looking into
this, but no notice of a fix. It could very well be fixed by now, but
I haven't checked myself since I found atlas.
> rgb
>
> Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
> Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
> Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
> Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@phy.duke.edu
Take care,
--
Camm Maguire camm@enhanced.com
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