BLAS and LAPACK Providers
BLAS, CBLAS, LAPACK, LAPACKE, ScaLAPACK, etc. are standards for linear algebra libraries defined by NetLib.
Any package implementing the api for BLAS and installing the library libblas.so would be a provider for BLAS, similarly for libcblas.so, liblapack.so, etc.
Overview
Gentoo provides virtual packages for ensuring that an implementation is present, virtual/blas, virtual/cblas, virtual/lapack, virtual/lapacke.
This ensures that during runtime one of the providers for the request virtual is going to be present.
Potential Hazards
Most providers for these packages also provide their own extensions in addition to the standard library api demanded by NetLib.
This can create problems if a package links to libcblas.so but uses extra functions, let us say, defined by Intel MKL libraries, because it expects that the libcblas.so is the one that is provided by sci-libs/mkl-rt.
This is incorrect behaviour and the packages in Gentoo should be amended so that they link with the respective named libraries instead of the standard libblas.so/liblapack.so/...
Providers
| Package | BLAS | CBLAS | LACPACK | LACPACKE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| sci-libs/lapack | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| sci-libs/openblas | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| sci-libs/mkl-rt | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| sci-libs/blis | Yes | Yes | No | No |
GPU limitations
Using a GPU to do BLAS calculations might seem very tempting but unfortunately real life is not so simple.
BLAS has been divided into 3 levels;
- level 1 - vector only : operations which only deal with vectors and scalars
- level 2 - matrix-vector : operations between vectors and matrices
- level 3 - matrix-matrix : operations between two matrices
For level 1, 2, the cost of copying elements from CPU memory to GPU memory offsets the benefit gained from doing GPU based calculations.
There is a lot of benefit for doing level 3 operations in the GPU as the copying cost is tiny compared to matrix multiplications.
In an ideal world, level 1 and 2 would be implemented in the library libcpublas.so and level 3 would be in libgpublas.so, which would simplify choosing the appropriate implementations for the desired functions.
Runtime switching
Gentoo provides a way to mix and match these packages by using eselect packages to change the library during runtime.
This is part of the Blas-lapack-switch project, which added this functionality to all provider packages.