[R-sig-hpc] R with FlexiBLAS on Mac and Windows

[Simon Urbanek]

George,

the macOS R release uses shared BLAS, and provides two umbrellas: one with native BLAS and the other with Apple Accelerate - both of which can be switched at load time. Analogously, it should be in principle trivial to provide one for FlexiBLAS (since you don't even need to re-compile R if the ABI is GNU Fortran-compatible which according to the docs FlexiBLAS is supposed to be). However, based on a quick test it seems current FlexiBLAS doesn't build on macOS so there the users are probably better off using the supplied BLAS options unless someone provides a compatible binary.

Cheers,
Simon



> On 30/05/2022, at 8:02 AM, George Ostrouchov <georgeost using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Are there good recipes for building R with FlexiBLAS on a Mac and on Windows?
> 
> I have found that R with FlexiBLAS provides an easy way to dynamically switch BLAS backends and have dynamic control over core use from R.  This is now becoming more common on clusters, where I have first seen it on systems that use EasyBuild. We have also now done it with spack. I think this has a future, with plans to tackle GPU backend switching eventually.
> 
> Having the same control on laptops would provide a consistent pathway to core control from laptop to cluster. This would remove one more barrier in a move from a laptop to a cluster. I would like to use it in my tutorials that aim to take R users to clusters and supercomputers.
> 
> Thanks,
> George
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