[R-sig-Debian] Compiling R-2.11.0 with ATLAS-tuned BLAS and LAPACK

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Avraham Adler <avraham.adler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you both very much for the advice. It is obviously significantly
> more complicated than I first thought (although I /did/ manage to
> compile both ATLAS and R under windows following the instructions, go
> figure :). ) so I'll stop trying to bite off more than I can chew.
>
> Thank you again,
>
> --Avraham

This question reminded me I never understood BLAS linkage with R when
I asked about it 2 months ago and I forgot to follow up.  I am looking
at

http://127.0.0.1:11224/doc/manual/R-admin.html#Shared-BLAS

It seems (to my untrained eye) to say that default R is  built with a
shared library based on a nonoptimized version of BLAS that is
distributed with R itself.  It says the recommended R

If one has a different BLAS shared library on my system, one does not
recompile. Rather move R's libRblas.so and then make a symlink from
the new shared BLAS to where the old one was.

The doc has this example:

ln -s /opt/acml4.4.0/gfortran64_mp/lib/libacml_mp.so R_HOME/lib/libRblas.so

So I'd just have to figure out which shared library is the right one
and put it where libRblas used to be.

Here's what I don't understand about the current R packaging.

In the deb packages,  I download from CRAN, there is no file
libRblas.so, so I don't see how to make that new link to test  a
different BLAS.


Oh, and while I'm asking, in the source for the R package, I find a
comment from Doug Bates (README.Debian) about stripping the R binary
and possible adverse effect on --debugger. That comment is pretty old,
perhaps it is before the day when there used to be a separate package
of debugging symbols?

pj

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas