[Numpy-discussion] Strategy for OpenBLAS

[Sturla Molden]

Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am getting the impression that OpenBLAS is looking like the most
> likely medium term solution for open-source stack builds of numpy and
> scipy on Linux and Windows at least.

I think you right. 

OpenBLAS might even be a long-term solution. We should also consider that
GotoBLAS (and GotoBLAS2) powered some of the World's most expensive
superomputers for a decade. It is not like this is untested software. 

The remaining test errors on Windows are also due to MSVC and MinGW-w64
differences, not due to OpenBLAS itself, and those are not relevant on
Linux.

On Apple, I am not sure which is better. Accelerate is faster in some
corner cases (level-1 BLAS with AVX, operations on very small matrices),
but it has issues with multiprocessing (GCD's threadpool is not forksafe).
Apart from that OpenBLAS and Accelerate are about equivalent in
performance. I have built OpenBLAS on OSX with clang and gfortran, it works
like a charm. So it might be worth cobsidering for binary wheels on OSX as
well.

Sturla