Template:Installing BLAS and LAPACK
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BLAS
The first thing you must have on your system is a BLAS implementation. "BLAS" stands for "Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines," and is a standard interface for operations like matrix multiplication. It is designed as a building-block for other linear-algebra applications, and is used both directly by our code and in LAPACK (see below). By using it, we can take advantage of many highly-optimized implementations of these operations that have been written to the BLAS interface. (Note that you will need implementations of BLAS levels 1-3.)
You can find more BLAS information, as well as a basic implementation, on the BLAS Homepage. Once you get things working with the basic BLAS implementation, it might be a good idea to try and find a more optimized BLAS code for your hardware. Vendor-optimized BLAS implementations are available as part of the Compaq CXML, IBM ESSL, SGI sgimath, and other libraries. Recently, there has also been work on self-optimizing BLAS implementations that can achieve performance competitive with vendor-tuned codes; see the ATLAS homepage. ATLAS works well, but it does take some time to compile.
Note that the generic BLAS does not come with a Makefile
; compile it with something like:
mkdir blas && cd blas # the BLAS archive does not create its own directory get http://www.netlib.org/blas/blas.tgz gunzip blas.tgz tar xf blas.tar f77 -c -O3 *.f # compile all of the .f files to produce .o files ar rv libblas.a *.o # combine the .o files into a library su -c "cp libblas.a /usr/local/lib" # switch to root and install
(Replace -O3
with your favorite optimization options. On Linux, I use g77 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops
, with -malign-double -mcpu=i686
on a Pentium II.) Note that MPB looks for the standard BLAS library with -lblas
, so the library file should be called libblas.a
and reside in a standard directory like /usr/local/lib
. (See also below for the --with-blas=lib
option to MPB's configure
script, to manually specify a library location.)
LAPACK
LAPACK, the Linear Algebra PACKage, is a standard collection of routines, built on BLAS, for more-complicated (dense) linear algebra operations like matrix inversion and diagonalization. You can download LAPACK from the LAPACK Home Page.
Note that our software looks for LAPACK by linking with -llapack
. This means that the library must be called liblapack.a
and be installed in a standard directory like /usr/local/lib
(alternatively, you can specify another directory via the LDFLAGS
environment variable as described earlier). (See also below for the --with-lapack=lib
option to our configure
script, to manually specify a library location.)