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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 7:29 PM, Julian Taylor
<jtaylor.debian at 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