[R-sig-Fedora] Centos / Fedora rpm - issue with openblas

[Michael Smith]

I'm very glad for this question, since it reminds me of how Revolution
Analytics get some of their speedup (using MKL if I'm not mistaken).

You mention you get a 50% speedup with OpenBLAS, which is wonderful. Are
there some other libraries out there that we could use on Fedora/CentOS
to speed up R?

Thanks,
M


On 06/16/2014 08:05 PM, enzo at smartinsightsfromdata.com wrote:
> Martyn
> 
> Many thanks for your clear reply.  I’m sure that this has been done for good reasons, but I am disappointed that  I need to organise myself to compile R from sources *just* to link another library: it looks like a functional regression to me, compared to 3.02 (and previous releases).
> 
> May I suggest at some point to amend R standard docs to clarify that the option described is no longer viable with Linux / Fedora?
> 
> Many thanks again.
> 
> Enzo
>  
> On 16 Jun 2014, at 11:49, Martyn Plummer <plummerm at iarc.fr> wrote:
> 
>> This is a change in the way that the RPM is built. The RPM for R 3.1.0
>> does not build its own blas and lapack libraries, but links directly to
>> external blas and lapack provided by Fedora.  This means that you can no
>> longer swap out libRblas.so by replacing it with a symbolic link to
>> openblas.
>>
>> If you really want openblas then you should install R from source using
>> the configure option --with-blas="openblas" (Recall that you need to
>> install the openblas-devel RPM).
>>
>> Martyn
>>
>> On Mon, 2014-06-16 at 08:53 +0000, enzo at smartinsightsfromdata.com wrote:
>>>
>>> I�ve installed R 3.1 with the latest Fedora rpm
>>> (R-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64.rpm) and I run into some issues with openblas.
>>>
>>> I�ve documented this with an open question on stack overflow here:
>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24158372/openblas-r-3-1-and-fedora-centos-dist
>>>
>>> Basically before 3.1 I had 3.02 and I was able to install and use
>>> openblas following the instruction from official CRAN documentation,
>>> symlinking the openblas library instead of the �official� one, with a
>>> significant improvement in performance.
>>>
>>> Now I do not know how to dynamic-link the openblas libraries anymore,
>>> as it seems that either the address of the standard libs is changed,
>>> or the working of the libraries has changed.
>>>
>>> Could somebody be so kind to shed some light?
>>>
>>> Many thanks in advance!
>>>
>>> Enzo Martoglio
>>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> R-SIG-Fedora mailing list
>>> R-SIG-Fedora at r-project.org
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
>>>
>>
> 
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