[R-sig-Debian] Special BLAS and explcit parallel code
Dirk Eddelbuettel
edd at debian.org
Wed Mar 16 12:31:33 CET 2011
On 16 March 2011 at 10:42, Matthieu Stigler wrote:
| Le 16/03/2011 01:48, Dirk Eddelbuettel a écrit :
| > On 16 March 2011 at 00:32, mat wrote:
| > | Dirk, thanks a lot for answering to these (maybe trivial) questions!!
| > | Very nice! Answers below
| > |
| > | Le 15. 03. 11 18:57, Dirk Eddelbuettel a écrit :
| > |> On 15 March 2011 at 18:27, Matthieu Stigler wrote:
| > |> | Hi
| > |> |
| > |> | I just read the thread on gotoBLAS, as well as the excellent vignette of
| > |> | gcbd. I still have some confusion and would like to ask very basic
| > |> | questions, hope I am not taking too much of your time.
| > |> |
| > |> | The point that retained my attention was the question of using implicit
| > |> | (multi-threaded blas) versus explicit (parallel code) optimisation. As I
| > |> | understood, the ideal would be to use a multi-threaded BLAS for simple
| > |> | code, and restrict it to use one core when parallel R code is used? Do
| > |>
| > |> Right, as fine-grained parallelism (via BLAS) can clash with coarse-grained
| > |> parallelism (via, say, multicore) where you could end up with 'overbooked'
| > |> cpus. Being able to tell the BLAS implementation to _not_ use parallel code
| > |> is a nice feature ... which Atlas for example does not have.
| > |>
| > |> | you agree? I could not find the presentation of R Bivand on this... Any
| > |> | other references on this question?
| > |> |
| > |> | Secondly, I am a little bit confused about how this is done on Ubuntu.
| > |> | First of all.... I am not sure of which BLAS is actually being used... a
| > |> | dpkg -l indicated me that both liblas (-dev and 3gf) and libatlas
| > |> | (3gf-base) are installed... Doing:
| > |> |
| > |> | $ ls -n /usr/lib/R/lib/
| > |> | total 2528
| > |> | -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 2583076 2011-02-26 04:21 libR.so
| > |> |
| > |> | I don't see which one is used actually... how can I figure out?
| > |>
| > |> Use the 'ldd' command, not the 'ls' command, and run
| > |>
| > |> $ ldd /usr/lib/R/lib/libR.so
| > | on one machine:
| > | libblas.so.3gf => /usr/lib/atlas/libblas.so.3gf
| > |> $ ldd /usr/lib/R/modules/lapack.so
| > | liblapack.so.3gf => /usr/lib/atlas/liblapack.so.3gf (0x00007fcc50272000)
| > |
| > | so I guess this mean I am already using the atlas implementation of
| > | BLAS? Good!
| >
| > Looks like you do.
| this is what I suspected: on one other machine (very freshly installed
| Ubunu 10.10 with R from CRAN miror), seems I have the standard blas:
| $ ldd /usr/lib/R/lib/libR.so
| libblas.so.3gf => /usr/lib/libblas.so.3gf (0x00007f3bc03e5000)
| $ ldd /usr/lib/R/modules/lapack.so
| liblapack.so.3gf => /usr/lib/liblapack.so.3gf (0x00007f2d7b14b000)
| libblas.so.3gf => /usr/lib/libblas.so.3gf (0x00007f2d7aecc000)
|
| am I right this is the standard blas (as you are refering in your
| paper?). If yes, how one does do to link R to atlas (don't know how this
| happened on other machine :-))... will simply installing libatlas-dev do
| the trick?
Yes, do
apt-get install libatlas3gf-base
(as root or via sudo) which is all it takes (cf function installAtlas() in gcbd).
Dirk
| Thanks!!
| > |> That should show you e.g. your Atlas libblas and liblapack, if you have those
| > |> packages installed.
| > |>
| > |> Also note that /usr/bin/R sets more LD_LIBRARY_PATH arguments meaning so it
| > |> can potentially see more locations than the system default for ld.so
| > |> reflected in the ldd output you just saw.. That is the trick which was used
| > |> by the MKL package so that R saw those libraries but other programs did
| > |> not... (as per the wishes of Intel who gave REvo permission to distribute MKL
| > |> just for R on Ubuntu).
| > |>
| > |> Makes sense?
| > | definitely! (although still need to meditate on the story of locations
| > | for ld.so)
| > |
| > | Now the question is, once I install say gotBLAS through this script you
| > | recommend, is it easy to switch from one BLAS to another, as you did in
| > | your investigation, or does it require some tricky methods?
| >
| > The idea is to just use the package managers. By having a proper .deb package
| > based on Goto (using the gotoblas2-helper) you can drop Goto in and out as
| > you see fit.
| >
| > But do take a look at the benchmark results in the gcbd vignette -- the
| > differences are not that big. Unless you really really need it, it may not
| > be worth the sysadmin'ing hazzles.
| >
| > Dirk
| >
|
--
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
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