Hi MXNet community, I would like to bring your attention to the performance regression that was found [1] between 1.5.1 and 1.6.0 due to removing the libiomp5.so library due to licensing issues. This change was made since this library has a category x license [2] that is not compatible with the MXNet Apache license/distribution.
We found that using OpenBLAS instead of MKL BLAS caused a regression from 1500 samples/sec to 1300 samples/sec a 13.3% regression in training speed for a resnet18 training benchmark on a C5.18xlarge EC2 instance (with 72 cores). Rebuilding with MKL BLAS showed an increase in performance to 1600 samples/sec in the 1.6.0 branch. Please provide your feedback on the licensing issue (are there any work-arounds) and the tradeoff in performance (is the benefit worth trying to include back into MXNet builds). Thanks to the efforts of the following folks for working on this issue (in no particular order): Patric Zhao Amol Lele Tao Lv A Pedro Larroy Nihal Harish Chai Bapat Arjuna Keshavan Rong Zhang Thanks! Sam [1] https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues/16891 [2] https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x
