Re: [Help-gsl] GSL x Scilab (or Matlab)

[Martin Jansche]

On 10/24/05, Robinson Pizzio <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have converted my scilab functions that make use of many matrix
> operations to C programs using GSL library.
> I have not experience a significant better performance with the GSL
> library.

I don't know what libraries scilab uses for matrix computations. GSL
uses BLAS routines in many places via the CBLAS API.  There is a very
clean separation between the CBLAS API and the rest of the GSL, and
this allows you to use different implementations of BLAS in place of
GSL's implementation (see
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/gsl-ref_2.html#SEC13 for
further details). (I don't think things are quite as clean when it
comes to LAPACK functionality.)

Depending on your architecture and OS, there may be several
alternative BLAS implementations: there is ATLAS, which is platform
independent; Goto's implementation, which is also generic; AMD has
ACML, which works on its latest generation of CPUs; Intel has the
analogous Intel MKL; Sun has a similar library for the SPARC; and
there are a number of other commercial options.

My guess is that you'll only start to see performance improvements
when you link against one of those optimized implementations of BLAS.
-- mj