[Numpy-discussion] MKL and OpenBLAS

[Matthieu Brucher]

According to the discussions on the ML, they switched from GPL to MPL
to enable the kind of distribution numpy/scipy is looking for. They
had some hesitations between BSD and MPL, but IIRC their official
stand is to allow inclusion inside BSD-licensed code.

Cheers,

Matthieu

2014-02-06 20:09 GMT+00:00 Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com>:
>
>
>
> 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?
>
> 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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