[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS-PSC] BLAS/LAPACK

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 15:24 +1200, Hamish wrote:

Brad Douglas wrote:
> Both Soren and myself would like to replace the BLAS/LAPACK (Fortran
> code) libraries with ATLAS, a tuned C version. This also gets us away
> from the Fortran issues suffered by gcc4.
>
> If there are no objections, I would like to go ahead and modify
> configure.in and include/ to reflect this.
..
> One thing we have not discussed yet is possibly merging lib/gmath and
> lib/gpde. Right now, we should probably leave it alone. I haven't
> checked to see what all uses lib/gpde.

Hi,

IMO important technical decisions such as this need to happen over on
the grass-dev mailing list to allow contributions from all devels and
a single source for future thread archive searches.

I've already discussed most of this without objection on the dev list.
cc'ing this email.

and FWIW, fortran90 support in the latest gcc4 releases seems to be much
improved over earlier versions. (but AFAIK grass has ever only linked to
f77 stuff)

That requires that BLAS/LAPACK be ported to f90. BTW, I have created a
work-around that allows gcc4 to still use f77.

Regardless, BLAS/LAPACK needs better definition in autoconf. I have
autoconf code that allows us to pick and close the BLAS/LAPACK
implementation that best suits our needs. That could be traditional f77
BLAS/LAPACK, ATLAS, SciLAPACK, etc.

This gives the person compiling the ability to "tune" to their
application (cluster, SMP, SMP cluster).

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to test it (autoreconf issues).

--
73, de Brad KB8UYR/6 <rez touchofmadness com>