[Numpy-discussion] Changing the distributed binary for numpy 1.0.4 for windows ?

[Travis E. Oliphant]

Fernando Perez wrote:
> On Dec 10, 2007 4:41 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> The current situation is untenable. I will gladly accept a slow BLAS for an
>> official binary that won't segfault anywhere. We can look for a faster BLAS later.
>>     
>
> Just to add a note to this: John Hunter and I just finished teaching a
> python workshop here in Boulder, and one attendee had a recurring
> all-out crash on WinXP.  Eventually John was able to track it to a bad
> BLAS call, but the death was an 'illegal instruction'. We then noticed
> that this was on an older Pentium III laptop, and I'd be willing to
> bet that the problem is an ATLAS compiled with SSE2 support.  The PIII
> chip only has plain SSE, not SSE2, and that's the kind of crash I've
> seen when  accidentally running code compiled in my office machine (a
> P4) on my laptop (a similarly old PIII).
>
> It may very well be that it's OK to ship binaries with ATLAS, but just
> to build them without any fancy instruction support (no SSE, SSE2 or
> anything else of that kind, just plain x87 code).
>   

I think this is what the default should be (but plain SSE allowed).  
However, since I have moved, the machine I was using to build "official" 
binaries has switched and that is probably at the core of the problem.

Also,  I've tried to build ATLAS 3.8.0 without SSE without success (when 
I'm on a machine that has it).

It would be useful to track which binaries are giving people problems as 
I built the most recent ones on a VM against an old version of ATLAS 
(3.6.0) that has been compiled on windows for a long time.

I'm happy to upload a better binary of NumPy (if I can figure out which 
one is giving people grief and how to create a decent one).

-Travis O.