Another pure maintenance release 0.2.7 of the gcbd package is now on CRAN. The gcbd proposes a benchmarking framework for LAPACK and BLAS operations (as the library can exchanged in a plug-and-play sense on suitable OSs) and records result in local database. Its original motivation was to also compare to GPU-based operations. However, as it is both challenging to keep CUDA working packages on CRAN providing the basic functionality appear to come and go so testing the GPU feature can be challenging. The main point of gcbd is now to actually demonstrate that ‘yes indeed’ we can just swap BLAS/LAPACK libraries without any change to R, or R packages. The ‘configure / rebuild R for xyz’ often seen with ‘xyz’ being Goto or MKL is simply plain wrong: you really can just swap them (on proper operating systems, and R configs – see the package vignette for more). But nomatter how often we aim to correct this record, it invariably raises its head another time.
This release accommodates a CRAN change request as we were
referencing the (now only suggested) package gputools. As
hinted in the previous paragraph, it was once on CRAN but is not right now so we
adjusted our reference.
CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release.
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This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.