[Rd] Problem building R with Intel MKL v10 BLAS

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> 
>> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>> On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Michael Braun wrote:
>>>
>>>> Thanks for everyone's help.  Unfortunately, still no success.  So I 
>>>> took the alternate route suggested in section A.3.1.5 of R-admin, 
>>>> and just created a symbolic link from libRblas.so to 
>>>> .../libmkl_gf_lp64.so.  I can still multiply 2 matrices together in 
>>>> R, so it looks like this is working. Can you propose any other test 
>>>> to be sure?
>>>
>>> Run 'make check' ... it includes some tests specifically for working 
>>> BLAS.
>> <snipped>
>>
>> That reminds me of a discussion I had with our IT guy regarding 
>> building R 2.5.0 against MKL 8. He had MKL 8.0 against 2.4.x 
>> previously and it is
>> actually faster than 9.x ; but he was having trouble upgrading to R
>> 2.5.0 (with MKL 8).
>>
>> It turns out that R 2.5.0 added a couple of checks for some
>> double-complex BLAS/LAPACK routines (I can't remember which), which 
>> are missing in MKL8, so it is a fact that R 2.5.0 won't build against 
>> MKL 8 - but will build against MKL 9, and once you have built 2.5.0 
>> against MKL9, you can swap the libraries (somewhat dangerously) to get 
>> the speed
>> of MKL8 back...
>>
>> It is not unthinkable that some more checks are added in 2.6.x and
>> MKL 10 is not passing them... one needs the result of config.log to be 
>> sure.
> 
> Looking at the svn logs, the last change to the BLAS configure tests was 
> in Nov 2005.
> 

That would be in the R 2.2 <-> R 2.3 time frame (maybe our IT guys was 
having problem jumping from 2.2 to 2.5)... Anyway, I am quite sure about
the R 2.5 + MKL 8 failure as I had looked at the config.log myself then.
To see what's wrong with the original poster's set up one needs to look
at the config.log .