Changing from a generic to a tuned atlas version

Question

I have Fedora 16 with the atlas-sse3 package installed and used by numpy and scipy. All 3 packages are from the distribution's repository. My question is, if i download a source rpm of the Atlas library and compile it to fit my hardware better, do i need to compile numpy and scipy also against the new installed Atlas version?

Answer 1

On my computer I compiled SciPy using the newest lapack[from here[(http://www.netlib.org/lapack/), which contains its own blas library. I guess for atlas the process will be similar:

1. compile the blas library. Go to SRC and run make
2. compile the lapack library. Rename make.inc.example to make.inc and edit it if necessary (the optimization flag -O2 should be there, and it can be changed to -O3 for the most optimized case). Runmake

Then, in the scipy source folder:

1. rename site.cfg.example to site.cfg and add this (the paths are in Windows format):

   [lapack] library_dirs = C:\Users\pfh-castro\Downloads\lapack-3.4.2 lapack_libs = lapack, tmglib [blas] library_dirs = C:\Users\pfh-castro\Downloads\lapack-3.4.2 blas_libs = refblas

2. run python setup.py config --compiler=mingw32 build --compiler=mingw32 install

The build version will be in ./build.

You should also have a look here.