On 11 June 2010 at 23:01, Matt Shotwell wrote: | In the case of REvolution R, David mentioned using the Intel MKL, | proprietary library which may not be distributed in the way R is | distributed. Maybe REvolution has a license to redistribute the library. | For the others, I suspect Gabor has the right idea, that the R-core team | would rather not keep architecture dependent code in the sources, | although there is a very small amount already (`grep -R __asm__`). | | However, I know using Linux (Debian in particular) it is fairly | straightforward to build R with `enhanced' BLAS libraries. The R | Administration and Installation manual has a pretty good section on | linking with enhanced BLAS and LAPACK libs, including the Intel MKL, if | you are willing cough up $399, or swear not to use the library | commercially or academically.
BLAS is actually an interface standard, so there is no _rebuilding of R_ required. BLAS allows you to simply drop in a better BLAS library. The "R Inst + Admin" manual has the details. | Maybe a short tutorial using free software, such as ATLAS would be | suitable content for an r-bloggers post :) ? Given the drop-in nature, on suitable platforms all it takes is sudo apt-get install libatlas3gf-base which gets you there most of the way using 'base' Atlas (ie not cpu tuned). On my platform I also see libatlas3gf-3dnow libatlas3gf-base libatlas3gf-core2sse3 libatlas3gf-sse2 libatlas3gf-sse3 libatlas3gf-sse but this list will differ for different hardware platforms. Whenever I looked at this I found the different between 'base' and 'more tuned' atlas libraries to be rather small so I tend to just stick with base. Also, Atlas on Debian/Ubuntu is still single-threaded (as opposed to the MKL). But one can drop in the Goto BLAS from U Texas which are 'free' but non-redistributable. Lastly, as David's article said and as knowledgeable people often repeat: unless you do _lots_ of linear algebra this will not noticeably affect overall R performance as a lot of time is spent in other areas too. -- Regards, Dirk ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
