This Homebrew tap provides BLAS-related formulae beyond what homebrew/core provides. This includes multiple BLAS implementations, and formulae that build against OpenBLAS instead of Apple Accelerate.
This is a fork of dpo's original openblas tap. It was created to support Octave.app development. The differences are:
- This fork of the tap installs all the OpenBLAS-linked formulae with
-openblassuffixes in their names, so they do not conflict with formulae from core Homebrew orhomebrew-octave-app-bases. - This fork provides additional BLAS implementations besides OpenBLAS
BLAS is an API specification for a linear algebra library. There are multiple implementations of it available. These include:
- Apple Accelerate/vecLib
- The BLAS Reference Implementation from Netlib. This is a non-optimized BLAS implementation.
- OpenBLAS, an optimized open source BLAS implementation.
- ATLAS
- Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL)
Apple Accelerate/vecLib is provided by macOS. Homebrew core supplies an OpenBLAS formula. This tap provides formulae for ATLAS (atlas) and the BLAS Reference Implementation (blas-ri).
The Intel MKL isn't Free Software, but it is free as in beer! You can download it, use it, and redistributed it without charge.
In theory, software built against the BLAS API can swap out its implementation libraries at run time. This would be accomplished on macOS with the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH and/or DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES environment variables if it's not directly supported by the software. (I haven't tried this yet, though.)
This tap depends on formulae in octave-app/octave-app-bases, so you need to tap them both.
brew tap octave-app/octave-app-blas
brew tap octave-app/octave-app-bases
brew install octave-openblas
brew install blas-ri atlas
These formulae will not be linked by default, so you need to run them from $(brew --prefix <formula>)/bin. For example, run octave-openblas with $(brew --prefix octave-openblas)/bin/octave. To enble running them with shorter names, create symlinks to them in your /usr/local/bin directory: ln -s $(brew --prefix octave-openblas)/bin/octave /usr/local/bin/octave-openblas.
To use the libraries installed by these formulae, you will need to pass additional configure or compiler flags pointing at the formula installations.
If you're an Octave hacker and want to test the next upcoming release from the "stable" branch in the Octave Mercurial repo:
brew tap octave-app/octave-app-blas
brew tap octave-app/octave-app-bases
brew install octave-stable-openblas
ln -s $(brew --prefix octave-stable-openblas)/bin/octave /usr/local/bin/octave-stable-openblas
octave-stable-openblas
Or if you want to go crazy and try the unstable "default" development code:
brew install octave-default-openblas
ln -s $(brew --prefix octave-default-openblas)/bin/octave /usr/local/bin/octave-default-openblas
TODO: Consider providing these "octave--openblas" commands automatically in the formulae.