From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Pjotr Prins Subject: Re: OpenBLAS and performance Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2017 17:08:25 +0100 Message-ID: <20171222160825.GA20709@thebird.nl> References: <20171219104956.GB806@thebird.nl> <87tvwl7h4w.fsf@albion.it.manchester.ac.uk> <87ind05dwm.fsf@gnu.org> <87vagz0w4y.fsf@albion.it.manchester.ac.uk> <87tvwi94sw.fsf@inria.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:45550) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1eSPup-0006Rl-Ry for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 22 Dec 2017 11:11:20 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1eSPuo-0003Fr-Vr for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 22 Dec 2017 11:11:19 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <87tvwi94sw.fsf@inria.fr> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Ludovic =?iso-8859-1?Q?Court=E8s?= Cc: Guix-devel , Eric Bavier , Dave Love , Federico Beffa On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 04:10:39PM +0100, Ludovic Court=C3=A8s wrote: > Static binding has a cost, as you write, but it gives us control over > the environment, and the ability to capture and replicate the software > environment. As a user, that=E2=80=99s something I value a lot. > I=E2=80=99d also argue that this is something computational scientists = should > value: first because results they publish should not depend on the phas= e > of the moon, second because they should be able to provide peers with a > self-contained recipe to reproduce them. As a scientist I value that *more* than a lot. There is a tension between 'just getting things done' and making things reproducible. If we can do the latter, we should. Also as a programmer I value reproducibility a lot. I want people who report bugs to use the exact same setup. Especially when they are running on machines I can not access (quite common in sequencing centers). If someone sends me a core dump, stack trace or even an asserting in a shared lib it is incredibly useful the full stack is the same. I am wary of flexible resolution of optimized libraries and kernels. Look at what atlas tried to do and what a mess it became. I strongly believe we need explicit statements about what we are running. It does imply Guix will have to provide all options, directly or through channels. I also work on HPC and if I know where I am running I know *what* to target. It is a deterministic recipe.=20 Pj.