[Rd] BLAS / LAPACK version information from within R-session?

[Peter Ruckdeschel]

Hi,

for diagnostic purposes, I would like to get information about
the BLAS / LAPACK linked against R from within an R-session.

An obvious application could be safety-checks for packages like
Matrix and quantreg at load / attach - time.

Also you could be more precise on the "framework" in which R
is running for comparable benchmark timings on different systems.

Perhaps this information may even be included into the output
of R.Version() :-) ?

So my question:

    Is this possible/reasonable at all?

My impression is that it is not trivial, as you may ---at least
on Win32--- even replace the standard Rblas.dll by some of the
"better" Rblas.dll 's available on

  http://cran.at.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/ATLAS/

without telling R in any way before launching R.


In the (Win32) case I imagine you could read out the

      StringFileInfo

of the Rblas.dll being used --- which, for the time
being, however, does not yet contain information on
the BLAS version. But a (mid term) solution could be:

(1) For building Rblas.dll from source, extend

    src/gnuwin/dllversion.rc

from the standard R tar-ball to a new ressource file, say,

 src/gnuwin/blasdllversion.rc

including version information on BLAS/LAPACK which is then
used for building Rblas.dll.

(2) Successively replace files from

  http://cran.at.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/ATLAS/

by ones built against blasdllversion.rc



Unfortunately, I have no idea whether/how you could use information
similar to StringFileInfo in other OS's ...

Any suggestions appreciated.

Best,
Peter Ruckdeschel