[Numpy-discussion] Accelerate or OpenBLAS for numpy / scipy wheels?

[Andrew Jaffe]

On 28/06/2016 18:50, Ralf Gommers wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 5:50 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov
> <mailto:chris.barker at noaa.gov>> wrote:
>
>         > This doesn't really matter too much imho, we have to support Accelerate
>         > either way.
>
>     do we? -- so if we go OpenBlas, and someone want to do a simple
>     build from source, what happens? Do they get accelerate?
>
> Indeed, unless they go through the effort of downloading a separate BLAS
> and LAPACK, and figuring out how to make that visible to
> numpy.distutils. Very few users will do that.
>
>     or would we ship OpenBlas source itself?
>
> Definitely don't want to do that.
>
>     or would they need to install OpenBlas some other way?
>
> Yes, or MKL, or ATLAS, or BLIS. We have support for all these, and
> that's a good thing. Making a uniform choice for our official binaries
> on various OSes doesn't reduce the need or effort for supporting those
> other options.
>
>         >> >> Faster to fix bugs with good support from main developer.  No
>         >> >> multiprocessing crashes for Python 2.7.
>
>     this seems to be the compelling one.
>
>     How does the performance compare?
>
> For most routines performance seems to be comparable, and both are much
> better than ATLAS. When there's a significant difference, I have the
> impression that OpenBLAS is more often the slower one (example:
> https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/533).

In that case:

  -1

(but this seems so obvious that I'm probably missing the point of the +1s)