Fixed BLAS tests for external BLAS library
Hi Tomas, Thanks for your reply. I find your response curious, however. Surely the identical() test is simply incorrect when catering for possibly different BLAS implementations? Or is it the case that conformant BLAS implementations all produce bit-identical results, which seems unlikely? (Sorry, I am unfamiliar with the BLAS spec.) Although whatever the answer to this theoretical question, the CentOS 7 external BLAS library evidently doesn't produce bit-identical results. If you don't agree that replacing identical() with all.equal() is clearly the right thing to do, as demonstrated by the CentOS 7 external BLAS library failing the test, then I think I will give up now trying to help improve the R sources. I simply can't justify to my client more time spent on making this work, when we already have a local solution (which I hoped others would be able to benefit from). Ah well. cheers, Simon
On 5 January 2018 at 00:07, Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Simon, we'd need more information to consider this - particularly which expression gives an imprecise result with ACML and what are the computed values, differences. It is not common for optimized BLAS implementations to fail reg-BLAS.R tests, but it is common for them to report numerical differences in tests of various recommended packages where more complicated computations are done (e.g. nlme), on various platforms. Best Tomas On 12/18/2017 08:56 PM, Simon Guest wrote:
We build R with dynamically linked BLAS and LAPACK libraries, in order
to use the AMD Core Math Library (ACML) multi-threaded implementation
of these routines on our 64 core servers. This is great, and our
users really appreciate it.
However, when building like this, make check fails on the reg-BLAS.R
test. The reason for this is that the expected test output is checked
using identical. By changing all uses of identical in this file to
all.equal, the tests pass.
Specifically, I run this command before make check:
$ sed -i -e 's/identical/all.equal/g' tests/reg-BLAS.R
I suggest that the test is fixed like this in the R source code.
Here is the configure command I use, on CentOS 7:
$ ./configure --with-system-zlib --with-system-bzlib --with-system-pcre \
--with-blas \
--with-lapack \
--with-tcl-config=/usr/lib64/tclConfig.sh \
--with-tk-config=/usr/lib64/tkConfig.sh \
--enable-R-shlib \
--enable-prebuilt-html
cheers,
Simon
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