[R] Problems building R 2.2.1 with libgoto and SSE2 enabled

[Ivan Adzhubey]

Hi,

I am trying to build R 2.2.1 with Kazushige Goto's BLAS library (libgoto) and 
encountered a problem: I have two computers with the almost identical 
hardware (P4 Northwood CPU, i875 chipset, 2GB DDR400 RAM) and identical Linux 
OS. I have the latest version of libgoto for this CPU installed on both boxes 
(libgoto_northwood32p-r1.00.so) and I am using gcc compiler flags "-O2 
-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -msse2" to enable use of SSE2 extensions. With 
one computer that works perfectly, while on the other one "make check" 
constantly fails on lm-test. If I remove "-mfpmath=sse -msse2" part from the 
gcc flags then all checks pass on the second computer too. Any hints on what 
may cause the error? Anyone willing to share his/her experience on building 
and using R with SSE2 and on libgoto performance in particular? I was 
planning to give ATLAS a try but pre-built binaries are not available for my 
distro and on my AMD Opteron cluster it took almost 48 hours to build. I am 
not sure my home computer (the one that gives me errors with libgoto/SSE2) 
would survive this.

TIA,
Ivan