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DGESDD from Lapack for R-1.4.0?

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Keith Richards-Dinger wrote:

            
No plans.
If you want to contribute tested code to do this it could be incorporated,
but the timescale for 1.4.0 is short: if that is to be released before
Christmas feature-freeze is imminent (but not yet announced).

We don't see R as a linear algebra system, and the aim of introducing
La.svd was accuracy not speed (the LINPACK version of svd having some
algorithmic limitations, as well as some problems on machines with
extra-precision FPU registers).
I'd want to see a wider comparison, including on non-ATLAS systems.
In particular, without ATLAS my 1GHZ PIII gives
[1] 22.76  0.06 22.80  0.00  0.00
[1] 16.32  0.15 16.95  0.00  0.00

and on Doug Bates' franz (with ATLAS)
[1] 14.70  0.03 17.96  0.00  0.00
[1] 15.00  0.03 17.71  0.00  0.00

which suggests something peculiar on your system, the only one I have ever
seen that has La.svd appreciably slower than svd.  We've had a couple of
instances where changing to use BLAS slowed down the code on the basic
system, so we know that the precise BLAS is important.