[Numpy-discussion] MKL and OpenBLAS

[Charles R Harris]

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 5:27 AM, Julian Taylor <jtaylor.debian at googlemail.com
> wrote:

>
> On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 1:11 PM, Thomas Unterthiner <
> thomas_unterthiner at web.de> wrote:
>
>> On 2014-02-06 11:10, Sturla Molden wrote:
>> > BTW: The performance of OpenBLAS is far behind Eigen, MKL and ACML, but
>> > better than ATLAS and Accelerate.
>> Hi there!
>>
>> Sorry for going a bit off-topic, but:  do you have any links to the
>> benchmarks?  I googled around, but I haven't found anything. FWIW, on my
>> own machines OpenBLAS is on par with MKL (on an i5 laptop and an older
>> Xeon server) and actually slightly faster than ACML (on an FX8150) for
>> my use cases (I mainly tested DGEMM/SGEMM, and a few LAPACK calls). So
>> your claim is very surprising for me.
>>
>> Also, I'd be highly surprised if OpenBLAS would be slower than Eigen,
>> given than the developers themselves say that Eigen is "nearly as fast
>> as GotoBLAS"[1], and that OpenBLAS was originally forked from GotoBLAS.
>>
>>
> I'm also a little sceptical about the benchmarks, e.g. according to the
> FAQ eigen does not seem to support AVX which is relatively important for
> blas level 3 performance.
> The lazy evaluation is probably eigens main selling point, which is
> something we cannot make use of in numpy currently.
>
> But nevertheless eigen could be an interesting alternative for our binary
> releases on windows. Having the stuff as headers makes it probably easier
> to build than ATLAS we are currently using.
>
>
The Eigen license is MPL-2. That doesn't look to be incompatible with BSD,
but it may complicate things.
Q8: I want to distribute (outside my organization) executable programs or
libraries that I have compiled from someone else's unchanged MPL-licensed
source code, either standalone or part of a larger work. What do I have to
do? <http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/FAQ.html#distribute-my-binaries>

You must inform the recipients where they can get the source for the
executable program you are distributing (i.e., you must comply with Section
3.2). You may also distribute any executables you create under a license of
your choosing, as long as that license does not interfere with the
recipients' rights to the source under the terms of the MPL.

Chuck
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