Will just installing this package speed up R?

Question

According to this link only installing the following package in Ubuntu will speed up R significantly for certain calculations:

libatlas3gf-base

Do I have to compile from source to get this benefit? If not, do I have to reinstall R after installing this package?

Are there any other packages that are similar to this in that they can speed things up by just installing them?

Answer 1

The libatlas3gf-base base package will already help over the default "reference blas", but you can (if you care) do better by locally building Atlas. That is in a way the whole point of Atlas as the A and T stand for Automatically Tuned.

Now, keep in mind that a) rebuilding the package is not as trivial as just installing the base package and b) you were quite right in pointing to certain calculations. Your net time spent in R will only rarely by bound by the linear algebra operations that you can accelerate here. So for me, just installing atlas-base is usually good enough on my Ubuntu and Debian systems.