Using a BLAS other than MKL

lucastheis / cmt

Fast CPU implementations of several conditional probabilistic models

http://lucastheis.github.io/cmt/

MIT License

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Using a BLAS other than MKL #9

Closed jakirkham closed 8 years ago

jakirkham commented 8 years ago

What is MKL being used for here? Is it simply for the BLAS? If so, would it be possible to use another BLAS like ATLAS or OpenBLAS?

lucastheis commented 8 years ago

Any BLAS implementation should work. OpenBLAS should be as fast as MKL now (or always was and I just wasn't aware of it) and is much easier to install, so I will remove the instructions to install MKL from the readme file.

jakirkham commented 8 years ago

Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I'm pretty fond of OpenBLAS. It's ability to detect architecture at run time and select the right assembly optimized kernels is great. Plus, the straightforward license just makes it simpler to reason about how it fits with other things. Not to mention its comparable performance to MKL.

How does BLAS selection work? Do I need to supply some particular flags (e.g. CXXFLAGS, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS) or some Python options in order to enable this?