Re: Atlas proposal
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 at 23:09:08 +0200, Sylvestre Ledru wrote:
> Quick remember, Atlas is a linear algebra library implementing the BLAS
> API/ABI. It is widely used in the scientific computing world but also by
> some spreadsheets (openoffice).
> This is an highly optimized library. The optimisation is done at build
> time against the hardware it is building on.
It seems to me that there are two major use cases:
For use on smallish data sets (most OpenOffice users, and I suspect many
scientific users too), all that matters is that it's correct and not
ridiculously slow; conservative assumptions (libatlas3gf-base), or indeed
the unoptimized BLAS, would probably be fine.
Prompting OpenOffice users with a debconf prompt that, as far as they're
concerned, says "[things you don't understand] will be slow unless you
[things you don't understand]" seems very undesirable. I don't want to
have to care about scientific computing stuff on large data sets, because
I don't *have* large data sets; I just want a spreadsheet :-)
(Is there anything that specifically needs Atlas and couldn't use BLAS?)
The other use case is serious HPC where it's worth rebuilding your packages
for the particular host/cluster, in which case an easy-ish way to build
a libatlas3gf-local package (/usr/share/doc/libatlas*/examples?) seems
sufficient?
Simon
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