R devel - Jun 2006 - is.Rs_own_BLAS() ?

Does anyone see a nice portable way to detect --- from inside R ---
if R is using its own BLAS or not?
{ And ideally, if not, can R find out which ``kind'' of
  (optimized) BLAS it does run? }

And the same for LAPACK ?

One way of getting a partial answer seems to be

Rs_own_LAPACK_and_BLAS <-
    list.files(file.path(R.home(), "lib"), pattern =
"^libRlapack") > 0

 (where I'd be grateful for confirmation from a Mac and a Windows user
  that the above does work)


The reason for asking is a plan of a somewhat automated speed
comparison simulation which seems to depend quite a bit on the
architecture and the version of BLAS it uses.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Martin Maechler wrote:
> Does anyone see a nice portable way to detect --- from inside R ---
> if R is using its own BLAS or not?
> { And ideally, if not, can R find out which ``kind'' of
>  (optimized) BLAS it does run? }
>
> And the same for LAPACK ?
>
> One way of getting a partial answer seems to be
>
> Rs_own_LAPACK_and_BLAS <-
>    list.files(file.path(R.home(), "lib"), pattern =
"^libRlapack") > 0
>
> (where I'd be grateful for confirmation from a Mac and a Windows user
>  that the above does work)
Not possible: R on Windows has a plug-in BLAS, and Simon has asked for the 
same on MacOS X.  And the BLAS and LAPACK are DLLs stored in R_HOME/bin, 
not import libraries stored on R_HOME/lib (which no longer exists).

There are even architecture-specific Rblas.dll on CRAN (and have been for 
some years).

Brian

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
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