Statically linking NumPy/SciPy against serial MKL

[Eric_H_5]

Hello,

I have spent a large amount of time in the past attempting to compile NumPy and SciPy in such a way that it can be used on clusters that do not have access to the Intel compiler and MKL libraries.  Specifically, one of the resources that I use utilizes the HTCondor distributed computing platform, where little can be guaranteed about the node that my jobs end up running on, and consequently any shared libraries that my code uses must be submitted along with the job itself.

As such, statically linking MKL libraries into NumPy and SciPy will make the code that I use substantially more portable (without recompiling), and less difficult to work with.  I have in the past managed to statically link in the MKL libraries that NumPy and SciPy need, but only by manually re-linking the libraries that these codes create, adding in the linker commands that the Intel Link Advisor suggests.

The official way to link against MKL in NumPy is to add an [mkl] section to the site.cfg configuration script, and pass the libraries that you wish to link against to mkl_libs (e.g. mkl_libs = mkl_intel_lp64, mkl_sequential, mkl_core).  I have glanced through the distutils scripts that NumPy uses, but I am not particularly familiar with distutils and as such I am having a difficult time figuring out how I would go about modifying the linker commands that the build script uses away from "-lmkl_intel_lp64 -lmkl_sequential -lmkl_core" to "-Wl,--start-group $(MKLROOT)/lib/intel64/libmkl_intel_lp64.a $(MKLROOT)/lib/intel64/libmkl_sequential.a $(MKLROOT)/lib/intel64/libmkl_core.a -Wl,--end-group".

Additionally, it would seem that the distutils script adds libguide and libmkl_avx to the list of libraries to link against, which I do not want because the former is a threading library and I want a serial version of NumPy, and the latter does not have a static version to link against.

Basically, I'm wondering if there isn't an easier way to compile NumPy and SciPy such that they are statically linked against the serial MKL libraries.  I know for example that adding "-static-intel" to the linker command statically links in the Intel compiler libraries, but as far as I can tell there is no such argument that does the same for MKL libraries.

It would currently seem to me that my only options are to manually relink all NumPy and SciPy libraries after they have been built by distutils, or to heavily modify the NumPy build scripts in some fashion to correctly compile them statically in the first place.  I would like to avoid the former, and I have no idea how I would go about doing the latter.

I am cross-posting this message to both the Intel MKL support forums, and the SciPy-user mailing list.

Thank you,

Eric Hermes