Description of problem: Technically, this is not a bug, but an enhancement request. Now days most of x86-64 hardware is multi-core/multi-cpu. On the multi-cpu platform pthreaded atlas libraries do offer significant performance enhancements. The same threaded libraries would work on a single-cpu hardware (with some performance penalty). So I would like to ask to consider using threaded version of atlas libraries in octave and related packages (e.g. suitesparse). I would imagine that other numerical packages (like scilab, R, numpy) would benefit from similar change as well, but I do not use them that much to speak for them. Dmitri.
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I'm not fond of the suggestion. Or at least if a threaded version is wanted, then we should ship one version that is 100% serial and another that uses parallel libraries. Also, OpenBLAS is now in Fedora, and in my experience it's quite much faster than ATLAS. It also has proper threaded libraries, whereas I haven't found ATLAS' parallellization to have any use...
I agree that at least the user should have the ability to determine the number of threads used at run time. Whether this is via multiple version or available via setting environment variables, I not too concerned with. Looking at openblas I see three different versions - main, openmp, and pthreads. What are the differences? Is there a preference?
openblas is serial, openblas-openmp is parallellized via OpenMP and openblas-threads is parallellized via pthreads. Since Octave isn't parallel (yet), there's no preference; any of these can be used. If Octave becomes OpenMP parallel, then one shoud use either the serial or the OpenMP version in order not to mess up the parallellization.
I built a version of octave against the serial openblas, and was encouraged by what seemed to be a 2x speedup in the benchmark_dtmm() times. I then linked against the openblas-openmp library (as it looks like octave has openmp support that we may want to turn on) but the test suite hangs here: scripts/special-matrix/hadamard.m ...................... so there is work to be done there.
In further testing, the openmp version give a nearly 4x improvement in the benchmark_dtmm() times on my 4 core cpu with 4 threads, and nearly identical speeds with OMP_NUM_THREADS=1 as the serial version. So I think linking to the openmp version of openblas by default would be a reasonable choice if we can solve the hang.
(In reply to Orion Poplawski from comment #7) > I then linked against the openblas-openmp library (as it looks like octave has > openmp support that we may want to turn on) but the test suite hangs here: > > scripts/special-matrix/hadamard.m ...................... > > so there is work to be done there. If you remember from the Octave developers' mailing list, Octave doesn't have OpenMP support; for some reason the configure option was just added at some point in time even though there are no OpenMP directives in the code. But yes, it might be coming in the near future.
If you plan to do the switch, remember OpenBLAS is only available on %ix86 and x86_64.
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