Re: Making Atlas 3DNow! aware

[R Clint Whaley <rwhaley@cs.utk.edu>]

Hank,

>We have been developing a variety of compiler support for using
>3DNow! (see http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~swar/); we would like to
>be able to:
>
>1. Substitute 3DNow! versions of specific parts of Level3 BLAS
>   (where do we look inside the ATLAS3 directories to insert a
>    simple patch for sgemm, for example?)
>
>2. Add 3DNow! (via our Scc compiler) to the ATLAS search
>
>Any suggestions?  Thanks.

I would say your best bet is to look at the ATLAS developer tarfile,
available from www.cs.utk.edu/~rwhaley/ATLAS/OS/index.html.  In this
tarfile, there is a document ATLAS/doc/atlas_os.ps, which describes
how to contribute kernels to ATLAS.

We have recently been trying to make it so ATLAS is available for
outside contribution, and so have created this developer release,
the website, and an e-mail list anyone interesting in contributing
can join (atlas-comm; details of joining the list are covered in
the paper).  I cc that list on this reply.

We have at least one person playing around with adding some explicit
3Dnow instructions to some kernels (and already have some contributed
kernels for SSE), but a compiler that can do it would certainly be
nice . . .

Cheers,
Clint