[Numpy-discussion] The BLAS problem (was: Re: Wiki page for building numerical stuff on Windows)

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 9:03 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Carl Kleffner <cmkleffner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> a discussion about OpenBLAS on the octave maintainer list:
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.octave.maintainers/38746
>
> I'm getting the impression that OpenBLAS is being both a tantalizing
> opportunity and a practical thorn-in-the-side for everyone -- Python,
> Octave, Julia, R.
>
> How crazy would it be to get together an organized effort to fix this
> problem -- "OpenBLAS for everyone"? E.g., by collecting patches to fix
> the bits we don't like (like unhelpful build system defaults),
> applying more systematic QA, etc. Ideally this could be done upstream,
> but if upstream is MIA or disagrees about OpenBLAS's goals, then it
> could be maintained as a kind of "OpenBLAS++" that merges regularly
> from upstream (compare to [1][2][3] for successful projects handled in
> this way). If hardware for testing is a problem, then I suspect
> NumFOCUS would be overjoyed to throw a few kilodollars at buying one
> instance of each widely-distributed microarchitecture released in the
> last few years as a test farm...
>
> I think the goal is pretty clear: a modern optionally-multithreaded
> BLAS under a BSD-like license with a priority on correctness,
> out-of-the-box functionality (like runtime configurability and feature
> detection), speed, and portability, in that order.

It sounds like a joint conversation with R, Julia, Octave team at
least would be useful here,

Anyone volunteer for starting that conversation?

Cheers,

Matthew