[Wien] WIEN and Mathematical libraries under Linux

[Ruben Weht]

Dear Wien users,

In the last weeks there were several emails regarding WIEN and
mathematical libraries under LINUX, in special Intel's MKL.

I have two comments that I think can be interesting for some of you.

1) My trial license of MKL is near to expire, so I asked people from
   INTEL for its status.

   They answered:

>  Ruben,
>  you can continue to use the libraries but you will not get support
>  or upgrades. We do offer academic pricing that is greatly discounted.
>  Academic programs can be found at
>  http://developer.intel.com/software/products/global/academic.htm.
>  Regards,
>  Al

So, users can continue to use the library without any problem.

2) I have also compared the performance of WIEN with MKL and ATLAS, for
different matrix sizes (I have tried only the real version of lapw1).
My computers are Athlon XP 2000+ under Redhat 8.0 and with ifc compiler.

The behavior (time of running for lapw1 in seconds) was:

# Matrix Size      MKL     ATLAS     MKL/ATLAS
   521 (10kpts)   16.52    17.80      0.928
  1083 ( 9kpts)  108.02   111.22      0.971
  1913 ( 9kpts)  466.42   478.72      0.974
  2490 (10kpts) 1081.68  1077.16      1.004

As you can see ATLAS behaves more or less similar to MKL at least for
my system. I think it can be a good solution for those people who
use Debian (I have read in the previous emails that some of you had
problems to install the rpms of MKL under Debian).
Please, remember that ATLAS has to be tuned for each particular system
(processor, memory, cache, etc).
You can find more information in: http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/

I hope these comments can be useful for some of you.
My best regards,

		Ruben