ATLAS installation from source

Question

Im installing ATLAS in RHEL 6 with gcc 4.4.2 using

../configure -b 64 -Fa alg -fPIC --cc=/lib/gcc/64-bit/4.4.2/bin/gcc --prefix=/home/pkgs/atlas

I have a 8Gig Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz machine and it takes close to 5 hours just for "make build" is this a normal? is there a way to speed up the tune and build process ?

Answer 1

From the ATLAS installation guide:

This is the step where ATLAS performs all its empirical tuning, and then uses the discovered kernels to build all required libraries. It uses the BLDdir created by the configure step, and is invoked from the BLDdir with the make build command, or simply by make. This step can be quite long, depending on your platform and whether or not you use architectural defaults. For a system like the Core2Duo with architectural defaults, the build step may take 10 or 20 minutes, while in order to complete a full ATLAS search on a slower platform (eg. MIPS) could take anywhere between a couple of hours and a full day.

So yes, this behaviour is totally normal, because ATLAS performs extensive test to determine the best math kernels for your system.

And yes there is a way to speed up the build process by using the architectural defaults. Note however that this could result in inferior performance of your ATLAS installation.