This package benchmarks performance of a few standard linear algebra operations (such as a matrix product and QR, SVD and LU decompositions) across a number of different BLAS libraries as well as a GPU implementation.

To do so, it takes advantage of the ability to 'plug and play' different BLAS implementations easily on a Debian and/or Ubuntu system. The initial version supported

• reference blas (refblas) which are unaccelerated as a baseline
• Atlas which are tuned but typically configure single-threaded
• Atlas39 which are tuned and configured for multi-threaded mode
• Goto Blas which are accelerated and multithreaded
• Intel MKL which are a commercial accelerated and multithreaded version. As for GPU computing, we use the CRAN package
• gputools

For Goto Blas, the gotoblas2-helper script from the ISM in Tokyo can be used. For Intel MKL we use the Revolution R packages from Ubuntu 9.10.