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How to build R on WinNT with ATLAS?

2 messages · Liaw, Andy, Brian Ripley

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Hi all,

Can anyone tell me how to build R on NT4 with link to ATLAS?  
I've downloaded all the tools, compilers and libraries on
Prof. Ripley's Rtools "portal", and the pre-built binary ATLAS
for Pentium II from netlib.  In src/gnuwin32/INSTALL, it
says to edit MkRules and Makefile, but I don't see any
reference to BLAS or ATLAS in those files.

Also, where should I put libz.a, libpng.a and libjpeg.a after
I compiled them from source?

BTW, anyone know where to find the MS HTML Help Workshop?
The link on the Rtools portal doesn't find it.  Search on MSDN
turns up nothing either.

I really would like to have R compiled with ATLAS.  I did this
on a Linux box, and the speed improvement for some matrix
operations is amazing.  For example, cor() runs approx. 10x
faster than R1.2.3 and Splus 6 on the same platform.

TIA for any help!

Andy
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On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Liaw, Andy wrote:

            
I assume that you have made ATLAS compile on Windows?  I failed with the
current version ....

You will need to do a fair bit of work.  BLAS uses src/appl/blas.f. Remove
that and re-make in src/appl, then link lapack.so and R.dll against the
ATLAS dll you made.
src/gnuwin32/bitmap/INSTALL tells you what to do, indeed the options you
need to compile them.  You don't need to move them from there.
That's recent: it worked last week, as I checked all the links in
R-1.3.0 before release.

It comes with VisualStudio, for example.  Looks like it is now part of
.NET beta SDK.

I'll try to find out if I have permission to put it up.
(My tests were much less spectacular.  After running R with ATLAS on both
Linux and Solaris I stopped, as I rarely saw more than a few percent gain
on my real tasks.  Your mileage may vary.)
If you do succeed, contribute back what you did please.