[Rd] OpenBLAS in everyday R?

[Kenny Bell]

Julia using OpenBLAS is *very* reassuring.

I agree that having it included as an options(...) feature should be OK.

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 3:22 PM Juan Telleria <jtelleriar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Julia Programming Language uses also OpenBlas, and it is actively
> maintained with bugs being fixed as I have checked it out:
>
> http://www.openblas.net/Changelog.txt
>
> So I still see it ok to be included as an options(...) feature (by default
> off, just for safety), over other Blas libraries.
>
> R could not use Intel MKL for legal reasons (I think), because as long
> that R ships with GPL libraries, shipping R by default with Non-GPL is
> illegal.
>
> Cheers,
> Juan
>
> El 17/12/2017 2:50 a. m., "Avraham Adler" <avraham.adler at gmail.com>
> escribió:
>
>> On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 7:41 PM, Kenny Bell <kmbell56 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > It seems like many of the multi-threaded BLASes have some sort of
>> > fundamental problem preventing use in the way Juan suggests:
>> >
>> >  - Dirk's vignette states that ATLAS "fixes the number of cores used at
>> > compile-time and cannot vary this setting at run-time", so any
>> > user-friendly implementation for R would have to compile ATLAS for 1-16
>> > threads to allow the user to switch at run-time. This might dramatically
>> > affect install times.
>> >
>> >  - MKL seems like it's been outright rejected in the past based on not
>> > being "free-enough".
>> >
>> >  - OpenBLAS causes crashes.
>> >
>> > Has anyone tried ExBLAS for use with R?
>> >
>> > On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Peter Langfelder <
>> > peter.langfelder at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I would be very cautious about OpenBLAS in particular...  from time to
>> >> time I get complains from users that compiled code calculations in my
>> >> WGCNA package crash or produce wrong answers with large data, and they
>> >> all come from OpenBLAS users. I am yet to reproduce any of their
>> >> crashes when using MKL and ATLAS BLAS implementations.
>> >>
>> >> Just my 2 cents...
>> >>
>> >> Peter
>>
>> I've been building R on Windows 64 bit with OpenBLAS for years and my
>> builds pass check-devel. For a while in the past it failed one check
>> as the tolerance was 5e-5 and with my build of OpenBLAS the error was
>> 5.4e-5 or 5.7e-5, but that was changed around R 3.3, if I recall
>> correctly. I provide descriptions here [1], but I haven't gone so far
>> as to post compiled Rblas.dlls just yet. My personal build sets 4
>> threads when compiling OpenBLAS itself as I'm currently on a quad-core
>> SandyBridge. In tests I ran a few years ago, both single and multi
>> threaded BLAS compile and then can be compiled into R with no issues
>> (on my platforms, at least). Most matrix operations performed better
>> with multi-threaded except for R's eigenvalue decomposition, to the
>> nest of my recollection.
>>
>> Avi
>>
>> [1] https://www.avrahamadler.com/r-tips/build-openblas-for-windows-r64/
>>
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