[Beowulf] glibc 2.22 includes a vector math library (x86_64 initially)

[Chris Samuel]

Hi all,

Don't know if many people noticed this, but this looks like a handy new 
feature for glibc to get (from the release announcement):

https://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-08/msg00609.html

#* Added vector math library named libmvec with the following vectorized
#  x86_64 implementations: cos, cosf, sin, sinf, sincos, sincosf, log, logf,
# exp, expf, pow, powf.

More info on the glibc website:

https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/libmvec

# Libmvec is vector math library added in Glibc 2.22.
#
# Vector math library was added to support SIMD constructs of OpenMP4.0
# (#2.8 in http://www.openmp.org/mp-documents/OpenMP4.0.0.pdf) by
# adding vector implementations of vector math functions.
#
# Vector math functions are vector variants of corresponding scalar math
# operations implemented using SIMD ISA extensions (e.g. SSE or AVX for
# x86_64). They take packed vector arguments, perform the operation on
# each element of the packed vector argument, and return a packed vector
# result. Using vector math functions is faster than repeatedly calling the
# scalar math routines.

All the best,
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci