[Bug 166871] New: Review Request: ATLAS

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=166871

           Summary: Review Request: ATLAS
           Product: Fedora Extras
           Version: devel
          Platform: All
               URL: http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: normal
         Component: Package Review
        AssignedTo: gdk at redhat.com
        ReportedBy: qspencer at ieee.org
         QAContact: dkl at redhat.com
                CC: fedora-extras-list at redhat.com


Spec Name or Url: http://webpages.charter.net/qspencer/rpm/atlas.spec
SRPM Name or Url: http://webpages.charter.net/qspencer/rpm/atlas-3.6.0-1.src.rpm
Description: The ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software) project is an ongoing research effort focusing on applying empirical techniques in order to provide portable performance. At present, it provides C and Fortran77 interfaces to a portably efficient BLAS implementation, as well as a few routines from LAPACK.


Notes:

This package provides replacements for the default blas and lapack libraries that should be substantially faster. A simple verification of speed improvement can be obtained using Octave with the following command:

echo "X=randn(500); t=cputime; Y=X'*X; disp(cputime-t); exit" | octave -q

On my system without atlas installed, I obtain this result:
0.52092

After running "rpm -i atlas-3.6.0-1.i386.rpm", I get:
0.15398

This is a 3x speedup that is obtained on base i386 architecture without any SIMD extensions. The package creates static libraries for sse, sse2, and 3dnow, but shared libraries for those are currently broken with gcc 4.

Because ATLAS is based on compile-time optimizations, distributing a package like ATLAS in binary format is a challenging problem. The Debian approach to this seems to make the most sense, so I'm using the Debian patches directly in the build process in order to avoid duplication of effort. See the document atlas_fedora_notes.txt for a more detailed explanation of the build scheme and discussion of the reasons for it.

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