Please port OpenBLAS to ARM

[openmathlib]

Please port OpenBLAS to ARM

[sylvestre]

I am available to test.

[xianyi]

ARM chips are mainly in embedded system, which rarely runs scientific
computation. However, I saw some vendors use ARM chips to build netbook
or pad. Because of low power, some guys try to build the green server
based on ARM chips. If this becomes the main trend, we will support ARM.

OpenBLAS has been accepted into Debian.
However, it fails to build under ARM. Probably because there is no file cpuid_arm.c.
See the build log:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=openblas&arch=armel&ver=0.1alpha1-1&stamp=1302897307

thanks

[sylvestre]

To me, it is already a strong trend. Many Linux distros are providing an ARM port, next release of Windows will support it. Many HPC players are supporting ARM, etc...

[xianyi]

I see.
To port new arch means lots of work, e.g. learning the new assembly
language, doing lots of experiment to investigate the feature of new CPU.
Now, we don't have enough developers to port it to ARM.

Our plan is
2011 0.1 version: ICT Loongson-3A
2012 0.2 version: Intel Sandy Bridge, ICT Loongson-3B(?)

Thank you

2011/4/17 sylvestre <
[email protected]>

To me, it is already a strong trend. Many Linux distros are providing an
ARM port, next release of Windows will support it. Many HPC players are
supporting ARM, etc...

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#17 (comment)

[sylvestre]

I can ask to some Debian people to help us to port it to ARM.

[xianyi]

That's great!

2011/4/17 sylvestre <
[email protected]>

I can ask to some Debian people to help us to port it to ARM.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#17 (comment)

[susilehtola]

Just any port is not that helpful. The idea of GotoBLAS (now OpenBLAS) is to be as fast as possible on the given processor, via the help of hand-tuned code.

My guess is that ATLAS is faster on ARM, if you don't tune OpenBLAS yourself for the specific processor. After all, ATLAS determines the methods to use on compile time by running benchmarks.

[xianyi]

Hi @jussilehtola ,

Yes, ATLAS is easy to port on new CPU.

If we obtain ARM 64-bit platform, we will do some experiments to optimize OpenBLAS on ARM.

Xianyi