Okay, I started taking notes here: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/wiki/BLAS-desiderata Please add as appropriate... -n On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 12:19 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 7:29 PM, Julian Taylor <jtaylor.debian@googlemail.com> wrote:
x86 cpus are backward compatible with almost all instructions they ever introduced, so one machine with the latest instruction set supported is sufficient to test almost everything. For that the runtime kernel selection must be tuneable via the environment so you can use kernels intended for older cpus.
Overriding runtime kernel selection sounds like a good bite-sized feature that could be added to OpenBLAS...
The larger issue is finding a good and thorough testsuite that wasn't written 30 years ago and thus does covers problem sizes larger than a few megabytes. These are the problem sizes are that often crashed openblas in the past. Isn't there a kind of comprehensive BLAS verification testsuite which all BLAS implementations should test against and contribute to available somewhere? E.g. like the POSIX compliance testsuite.
I doubt it! Someone could make a good start on one in an afternoon though. (Only a start, but half a test suite is heck of a lot better than nothing.)
-n
-- Nathaniel J. Smith Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh http://vorpus.org
-- Nathaniel J. Smith Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh http://vorpus.org