On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:52 AM, Sturla Molden <sturla.molden@gmail.com> wrote:
On 29/04/14 01:30, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
I finally read this paper:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/flame/pubs/blis2_toms_rev2.pdf
and I have to say that I'm no longer so convinced that OpenBLAS is the right starting point.
I think OpenBLAS in the long run is doomed as an OSS project. Having huge portions of the source in assembly is not sustainable in 2014. OpenBLAS (like GotoBLAS2 before it) runs a high risk of becoming abandonware.
Have you read the paper I linked? I really recommend it. BLIS is apparently 95% straight-up-C, plus a slot where you stick in a tiny CPU-specific super-optimized kernel [1]. So this localizes the nasty stuff to one tiny function, plus most of the kernels that have been written so far do in fact use intrinsics [2]. [1] https://code.google.com/p/blis/wiki/KernelsHowTo [2] https://code.google.com/p/blis/wiki/HardwareSupport -- Nathaniel J. Smith Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh http://vorpus.org