From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Nov 21 10:08:55 2002
Subject: Re: Patching Octave-MPI
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 10:08:53 -0600

On 21-Nov-2002, Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at jazz dot ncnr dot nist dot gov> wrote:

| If you want fast parallel matrix operations, wouldn't you be better off
| having an interface to scalapack or something similar?

Speaking of that, do you think it would be a good time to make it
possible for Octave to easily link to whatever version of the
blas/lapack the user wants at run time?  So instead of

  F77_XFCN (dgemm, DGEMM) (...);

in the code and

  g++ ... -llapack -lblas ...

or whatever, we would use

  octave_blas::dgemm_ptr (...);

or similar, and not link directly to lapack or blas, but load them and
initialize the set of pointers at startup time.  Then you could tell
Octave which lapack/blas combination you want using an environment
variable or command-line option.  This all assumes the right set
of configure options, otherwise we could still link to the normal
libraries and not offer the run-time option.

Does that allow us to support scalapack, or does scalapack not have
the same interface as lapack (after doing a quick check, it looks like
it does not).

Even if this does not allow simple quick support for scalapack, would
it be a useful addition?

jwe