[R] Problems building R 2.2.1 with libgoto and SSE2 enabled

[Peter Dalgaard]

Ivan Adzhubey <iadzhubey at rics.bwh.harvard.edu> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to build R 2.2.1 with Kazushige Goto's BLAS library (libgoto) and 
> encountered a problem: I have two computers with the almost identical 
> hardware (P4 Northwood CPU, i875 chipset, 2GB DDR400 RAM) and identical Linux 
> OS. I have the latest version of libgoto for this CPU installed on both boxes 
> (libgoto_northwood32p-r1.00.so) and I am using gcc compiler flags "-O2 
> -march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -msse2" to enable use of SSE2 extensions. With 
> one computer that works perfectly, while on the other one "make check" 
> constantly fails on lm-test. If I remove "-mfpmath=sse -msse2" part from the 
> gcc flags then all checks pass on the second computer too. Any hints on what 
> may cause the error? 

Some hints, nothing conclusive:

Different gcc versions? glibc? (perhaps only one machine was updated).

Does libgoto factor into this at all? Will things still (not) work if
you omit it? If so, are you sure that both machines are picking it up
correctly?

Which test is failing?

> Anyone willing to share his/her experience on building 
> and using R with SSE2 and on libgoto performance in particular? I was 
> planning to give ATLAS a try but pre-built binaries are not available for my 
> distro and on my AMD Opteron cluster it took almost 48 hours to build. I am 
> not sure my home computer (the one that gives me errors with libgoto/SSE2) 
> would survive this.

Build times for ATLAS are highly dependent on platform. On P4, it is
usually quite fast (since most choices are known in advance). 11
*minutes* on the one I'm using to type this. 

(Why are you keeping your Linux distro a secret, BTW?)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: (+45) 35327907