NumPy and SciPy. Static and dynamic loading

Question

TL; DR: Can I use the ATLAS / LAPACK static libraries with NumPy and SciPy?

Background:

After creating ATLAS with LAPACK with the following:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/files/Stable/3.10.1/atlas3.10.1.tar.bz2/download wget http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapack-3.4.2.tgz tar -jxvf atlas3.10.1.tar.bz2 mkdir BUILD cd BUILD ../ATLAS/configure -b 64 -Fa alg -fPIC \ --with-netlib-lapack-tarfile=../lapack-3.4.2.tgz \ --prefix=<ATLAS_INSTALL_PATH> make cd lib make shared make ptshared cd .. make install 

I got the following files in the BUILD/lib section:

 Make.inc@ Makefile 

.a files:

 libatlas.a libcblas.a libf77blas.a libptf77blas.a libtstatlas.a liblapack.a libf77refblas.a libptlapack.a libptcblas.a 

.so files:

 libsatlas.so* libtatlas.so* 

My first question is: why don't I have .so files (shared dynamic libraries) for lapack and cblas ?

My second question is: which of the following two files uses NumPy?

 libsatlas.so* libtatlas.so* 

Finally, if I define:

 BLAS=/path_to_BUILD/lib/libcblas.a LAPACK=/path_to_BUILD/lib/liblapack.a ATLAS=/path_to_BUILD/lib/libatlas.a 

and add /path_to_BUILD/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH and to the library_dirs variable in the library_dirs file in NumPy. Will NumPy and SciPy use my libraries? (although they are static?).

Answer 1

You must be able to. Add

 [DEFAULT] search_static_first = true 

into your site.cfg file, and you should be fine to go.