Re: FlexiBLAS as BLAS/LAPACK manager - Fedora 33 System-Wide Change proposal

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On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 at 10:34, Dave Love <loveshack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> [I found I hadn't sent this earlier, as I should have.]
>
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FlexiBLAS_as_BLAS/LAPACK_manager
> >
> > == Summary ==
> > BLAS/LAPACK packages will be compiled against the FlexiBLAS wrapper
> > library, which will set OpenBLAS as system-wide default backend, and
> > at the same time will provide a proper switching mechanism that
> > currently Fedora lacks.
> >
> I oppose this (in favour of a different approach) from experience in
> research computing system management, general support, and
> implementation.  It doesn't solve any problem I (have) had, as far as I
> can tell, and looks as if it produces more.  The licence seems to me to
> rule it out a priori.

The authors are going to add an exception, so the license won't be a
problem. What problems do you think it produces?

> The proposal doesn't justify things, including its dismissal of the
> simple, clean alternative in similar to Debian's, with which I have some

I don't justify that because Debian's alternative has been repeatedly
dismissed as an option for Fedora for a simple reason: one could end
up with libblas pointing to one implementation and liblapack pointing
to another. This problem, that Debian has, is solved with this
library.

> There will be hoops to jump through to get packages to configure when
> they don't know about the library.

I don't think so, but if there are serious issues, rolling back the
change is pretty straightforward.

> If I want to use a library that's
> not included, I'm in the same position.

No, you are not. You just need to point to that library using the
FLEXIBLAS environment variable.

> It's not clear to me a priori
> what happens if you try to use just BLIS even, given that OpenBLAS'
> LAPACK implementation isn't the vanilla one, and depends on OpenBLAS as
> far as I know.

I don't understand this. You can switch to BLIS easily. The default
one doesn't matter.

> The choice of OpenBLAS isn't justified.  It's not even
> obvious that you want the same implementation for serial and
> multi-threaded as OpenBLAS seems to have had continual problems with
> threading which BLIS hasn't as far as I know.  I expect OpenBLAS is the
> best serial option on average, at least, but that needs data for
> different architectures.

This is about having a sane default one. That's it. You can switch
then to whatever implementation you want.

> I realize no-one is going to be running Fedora on HPC systems, where
> this really matters, but presumably it filters down to RHEL, which is
> looking less and less like a good HPC platform to me.

Actually, FlexiBLAS is developed by researchers in HPC.

-- 
Iñaki Úcar
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