[R-sig-Debian] parallel BLAS for Ubuntu 11.10

[Douglas Bates]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Douglas Bates <bates at stat.wisc.edu> wrote:
> Has anyone succeeded in getting a parallel BLAS, such as Goto's BLAS,
> installed on a machine running Ubuntu 11.10?
>
> I currently have the libatlas3gf-base package installed on a machine
> with an AMD Athlon X4 processor.  I tried to install the
> libopenblas-base and libopenblas-dev packages but there seemed to be a
> glich related to having both libopenblas and libatlas3gf installed so
> that when I tried to recompile R it failed to start because one of the
> ATL symbols from Atlas was undefined.

I found out what the problem was through that devious approach of
reading the documentation :-) After installing libopenblas-base you
need to run

sudo update-alternatives --config liblapack.so.3gf

and choose the library in /usr/lib/lapack.

> Is it worthwhile making a custom version of Atlas?  Every time I try
> to compile a local version of Atlas it fails because of CPU Throttling
> being enabled.  I suppose I could reboot after tweaking the BIOS then
> compile then shutdown then tweak the BIOS but that seems like a
> complicated route to getting optimized BLAS.
>