On Friday, 17 July 2020 at 10:25, Dave Love wrote:
[I found I hadn't sent this earlier, as I should have.]
>
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FlexiBLAS_as_BLAS/LAPACK_manager
>
> == Summary ==
> BLAS/LAPACK packages will be compiled against the FlexiBLAS wrapper
> library, which will set OpenBLAS as system-wide default backend, and
> at the same time will provide a proper switching mechanism that
> currently Fedora lacks.
>
I oppose this (in favour of a different approach) from experience in
research computing system management, general support, and
implementation. It doesn't solve any problem I (have) had, as far as I
can tell, and looks as if it produces more. The licence seems to me to
rule it out a priori.
Licence issues seem to have been cleared according to a message further
down the thread.
The proposal doesn't justify things, including its dismissal of
the
simple, clean alternative in similar to Debian's, with which I have some
experience.
What exact alternative are you proposing, then? Carrying downstream
patches to all BLAS/LAPACK implementations like Debian? I don't think
that's sustainable.
(I don't know what the environment modules alternative is, since
that's one way of specifying the late binding.)
Environment modules are user-selectable sets of environment variable
values and require affected packages to be built in a specific way.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/EnvironmentModu...
BLAS isn't alone in presenting a substitute interface like that.
It
works well with a heterogeneous HPC cluster where you want different
BLAS implementations on different nodes (think KNL, A64FX).
I'm not sure what you mean here. What "substitute interface" are you
talking about?
There will be hoops to jump through to get packages to configure
when
they don't know about the library.
From what I understand from the proposal, FlexiBLAS looks like vanilla
BLAS and LAPACK to the consumers. No hoop jumping required.
If I want to use a library that's
not included, I'm in the same position. It's not clear to me a priori
what happens if you try to use just BLIS even, given that OpenBLAS'
From what I understand, if you select BLIS, then it'll be used for all
symbols it implements and netlib reference will be used for the rest.
Regards,
Dominik
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