[R-sig-Fedora] problems compiling for RHEL 5.3 x86_64

[Evan Cooch]

Well, CentOS 5.3, which amounts to the same thing.

I recently decided to upgrade my main research machine from Fedora Core 
8 -> CentOS 5.3. Basically, I was looking to move to a distro with 
longer 'term-of-life' than the release schedule for Fedora currently 
allows. The machine is a multi-Opteron box, so both 32- and 64-bit apps 
natively supported. Since I do a lot of 'linear algebra'-heavy things 
with R, I had compiled R 2.9.0 against the ACML blas. ACML contains 
lapack, so I killed two birds with one stone. Generally, I would do a 
configure with

./configure --with-tcltk --with-blas="-L/opt/acml4.3.0/gfortran64/lib 
-lacml"

Worked perfectly. Led to 10-20x speedup in certain calculations.


Things haven't been so good since moving to CentOS. The install of the 
OS went fine, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to compile R 
against blas - ACML-variety or otherwise. Moreover, putting in 
--with-lapack explicitly causes all sorts of errors - the main one being 
'hinted at' in the R admin docs. The error is

Error in La.svd(x, nu, nv) :
 BLAS/LAPACK routine 'DGESDD' gave error code -12
Calls: cancor -> svd -> La.svd -> .Call
Execution halted

So, from the admin guide, I find the following

Since ACML contains a full LAPACK, if selected as the BLAS it can be 
used as the LAPACK /via/ --with-lapack.
If you do use --with-lapack, be aware of potential problems with bugs in 
the LAPACK 3.0 sources (or in the posted corrections to those sources). 
In particular, bugs in |DGEEV| and |DGESDD| have resulted in error 
messages such as

DGEBRD gave error code -10

Not quite the same error code, but close enough I suspect they're related.

I tried different forms of blas too (atlas, acml) - made little difference.

So, several quick questions:

1. anyone managed to get x86_64 R compiled under either RHEL, Fedora, or 
CentOS? I don't mean 'installed from an RPM', but...compiled from source.

2. anyone who answers 'yes' to (1) - did you manage to get it to play 
nice with blas and lapack?


Before I do a clean install of yet another distro, I'd really like to 
figure out what is going on, and possibly solve the problem.

Thanks in advance...