[R] ATLAS

Martyn Plummer
Tue, 06 Nov 2001 09:29:17 -0000

On 06-Nov-2001 Vadim Ogranovich wrote:
> Dear R-users,
>
> I want to install R on our new Red Hat machine and I want R to use ATLAS
for
> its linear algebra calculations. The R-admin manual recommends building
> ATLAS into a shared BLAS library, which means that R should be able of
> detecting the library at RUN-TIME and fall back if there is none.
>
> I remember there was a discussion how to make R use BLAS, but that seems to
> deal with static linking only. Actually the very existence of that
> discussion made me doubt about the things that are probably obvious. So
here
> are my questions:
>
> * Do I need to make any modifications to the configure in order to build R
> that can dynamically link with BLAS shared library? If not, than the
> precompiled binary distribution should be able of doing this as well,
right?

Unfortunately not, because the precompiled binary is not dynamically linked
with BLAS.  As a matter of policy, I only link with libraries that are provided
on the main Red Hat distribution.  The blas library only appeared in the main
distribution in release 7.1 (Previously it was on the Powertools CD).
I have to cater for 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2, which means that you get the lowest
common denominator.

Martyn