[Numpy-discussion] Strategy for OpenBLAS

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On 5/27/15, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 7:56 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> This morning I was wondering whether we ought to plan to devote some
>> resources to collaborating with the OpenBLAS team.
>
> Sounds like a great idea to me. Even a bit familiar :-)
>    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/57498

I had forgotten that thread, thanks for reminding me.  I guess my idea
arose from my forgotten memory of that thread , but I was thinking
that it may be less of a burden, and allow more sharing of work, if we
concentrate on testing.  For example, if we have a testing repo on the
OpenBLAS org, I can imagine Julia / R developers finding bugs, and
adding tests to the Python repo, because the machinery to do that is
already built and documented (in my perfect world).

> The lead developers of both OpenBLAS and BLIS are currently at UT
> Austin: http://shpc.ices.utexas.edu/people.html
> ...and it turns out that this is also where SciPy will be held in
> July. Might be a good opportunity for numpy/scipy folks interested in
> these matters to sit down in the same room as them and hash out some
> kind of shared plan of action.

I'm afraid I'm not going to Scipy this year.  Nathaniel - would you
consider organizing something like this, with able help from those of
us going and not going who can contribute some time?

> (NB: I'm told that BLIS now has full multi-threading support, and that
> they are working on runtime CPU detection and kernel auto-selection
> right now.)

I can well imagine that BLIS will be a good option at some point, but
I'm guessing that it is unlikely we will be able to to use BLIS for
our default BLAS / LAPACK library on Linux / Windows / Mac in the near
future.  Is that right?

Cheers,

Matthew