Hacker News Reader

Comment by edraferi | Hacker News Reader

The article says they’d like to include BLIS in the benchmark, but nobody has written a good Numpy Conda package with BLIS hooks yet

View on HN

The article was specific to AMD's BLIS fork, but just as an FYI, using standard BLIS w/ numpy (which I believe would still outperform OpenBLAS) is pretty straightforward:

  conda create -c conda-forge -n numpy-blis numpy "blas=*=blis"

Are there any reads you can recommend on how to recover from (possibly) failed experiments like these under pip / conda / linux in general? I've been doing R and Linux for two decades, but still am perfectly capable of totally breaking my python/jupyter-workflow by messing up dependencies without knowing how to recover. Would love to learn to remedy that gap and reducing the risk.

When dealing with purely python packages: always always work in python virtual envs. Conduct these kinds of experiments in separate venvs. If worse comes to worse, a reset consists simply in deleting the venv directory and installing from scratch.

If an experiment involves system packages it's a little trickier. You can learn about Docker (which does for the whole system what venv does for python packages), but in most cases you may get away with just taking note of what packages you have installed/uninstalled, so you can revert the process later if needed.

never work as root, just undo all changes you did for it to work

You can actually see in my pasted command that I created a new venv for the blis install. It's as simple as "activate" or "deactivate" to switch around.

That's basically all there is to it, but here are some docs for you to reference from the top page of search:

https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/ta...

https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/eresearch-cookbook/recipe/20...

Why would you need a Conda package to measure performance or BLIS or another implementation? Assuming an ELF system, either preload an alternative library, or make a trivial shim for libblas.so3, as the Fedora blis package does. See the somewhat old https://loveshack.fedorapeople.org/blas-subversion.html for example.

because all of the people "benchmarking" cpus nowadays are just clueless self-advertisers...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com