ROPP_IO build with MKL broken

[marq]

Apparently, the recent changes to ropp_io (inclusion of some thinning routines) required the inclusion of Lapack libraries. In other ROPP packages, the configure scripts supports the --with-mkl option to allow transparent linking against the Math Kernel Library (MKL).

The current ropp_io build environment does not support this, nor is any other documented way to use the MKL.

This blocks finishing the ROPP package on my side.

[marq]

The usually available support for ATLAS instead of BLAS is also missing / broken.

[marq]

Fixed preliminarily in [1004].

Please check if this ok and close the ticket if so.

[Dave Offiler]

Is this MKL needed for a specific compiler? We had no problems building with ifort (top priority, since the thinner was developed specifically for DMI to a 'need by' date who also run the ifort v9. Portability was till now a seconary consideration)

The thinner explicitly uses a BLAS routine (unless the same routine is in ATLAS?) (And do we need ATLAS installed, or is it just there?)

The library test for BLAS & LAPACK in the Makefile.in hint at the (2) routines used in the thinner. Admittedly the Makefile change was a hack to get these 2 libraries into LDFLAGS.

I just checked with the new configure that Linux NAG build ropp_io with no problem.

Will close this when Mike's run through all the local compilers via the IDL tests (not until the new year now)

[marq]

ATLAS is an alternative (but faster) implementation of the BLAS. People doing numerical computations will often have that one lying around instead of a plain BLAS. The difference to the standard BLAS is that multiple libraries need to be linked into the executable.

As we've found no problems with the implementation (which has been obtained via copy-and-paste from the other ROPP packages), I'll close the ticket as fixed.