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

[George Ostrouchov]

Hi Simon, Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the pointers and checking on the Mac FlexiBLAS compile. I too have not been able to compile it on macOS yet. Let me give a bit more background.

I just finished teaching an R on clusters class on IT4I's Karolina, where I found FlexiBLAS as the R default installed with the EasyBuild foss toolchain: https://docs.easybuild.io/en/latest/Common-toolchains.html#foss-toolchain and I used Inaki’s package to manage cores. I’ll be teaching one in July on ORNL clusters, where we successfully made a spack recipe for the same. So I see this eventually becoming standard for R on clusters.

Having the same interface on a laptop would allow teaching the same thing on a laptop as on a cluster, making the transition much easier.  There are broader reasons (wrt python, Julia, and standardizing the whole data science toolchain) why going with FlexiBLAS is compelling.

Any pointers you may have on compiling FlexiBLAS on a Mac will be helpful. I will continue trying and if successful swapping it in as Simon suggests. A lot of people use Windows in my classes so I’m also looking for a Windows pathway.

Thanks,
George


> On May 30, 2022, at 1:13 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek using R-project.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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