Supplying NumPy site.cfg arguments to pip

From the source (https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/site.cfg.example):

To assist automatic installation like easy_install, the user's home directory will also be checked for the file ~/.numpy-site.cfg .

Is that a workable solution? You'd still need to preload the home directories with the global .numpy-site.cfg, but you wouldn't have to muck with the build or installation after that.

Your goal of installing NumPy to use Intel's Math Kernel Library is now much easier since Intel created pips to install MKL + NumPy:

pip uninstall numpy -y  # if the standard numpy is present
pip install intel-numpy

as well as intel-scipy, intel-scikit-learn, pydaal, tbb4py, mkl_fft, mkl_random, and the lower level packages if you need just them. Again, you must first uninstall the standard packages if they're already installed in your virtualenv.

NOTE:

If standard NumPy, SciPy and Scikit-Learn packages are already installed, the packages must be uninstalled before installing the Intel® variants of these packages(intel-numpy etc) to avoid any conflicts. As mentioned earlier, pydaal uses intel-numpy, hence it is important to first remove the standard Numpy library (if installed) and then install pydaal.

I ended up putting together a script to automate this. Here it is, in case it can help someone else. I've tested it in Python 2.7, but it should work elsewhere without significant modifications.

from __future__ import unicode_literals

import io
import os.path
import re
import subprocess
import urllib2

# This downloads, builds, and installs NumPy against the MKL in the
# currently active virtualenv

file_name = 'numpy-1.6.2.tar.gz'
url = ('http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/NumPy/1.6.2/'
       'numpy-1.6.2.tar.gz/download')

def main():

    # download NumPy and unpack it
    file_data = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
    with io.open(file_name, 'wb') as fobj:
        fobj.write(file_data)
    subprocess.check_call('tar -xvf {0}'.format(file_name), shell=True)
    base_name = re.search(r'(.*)\.tar\.gz$', file_name).group(1)
    os.chdir(base_name)

    # write out a site.cfg file in the build directory
    site_cfg = (
        '[mkl]\n'
        'library_dirs = /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013.1.117/mkl/lib/intel64\n'
        'include_dirs = /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013.1.117/mkl/include\n'
        'mkl_libs = mkl_rt\n'
        'lapack_libs =\n')
    with io.open('site.cfg', 'wt', encoding='UTF-8') as fobj:
        fobj.write(site_cfg)

    # build and install NumPy
    subprocess.check_call('python setup.py build', shell=True)
    subprocess.check_call('python setup.py install', shell=True)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()