Within the past two years I've discovered something interesting about myself (...actually really, really boring about myself): I can be happily entertained for hours on end setting up my computational environment just right. I find that it gives me a similar type of satisfaction to cataloguing my music collection. I guess you could call it a hobby.

Usually this entails installing the usual suspects (NumPy, Pandas, IPython, matplotlib, etc.) in a python virtual environment. When I'm particularly into it (which is always), I'll also compile the python distribution itself. I've had several opportunities to indulge this pasttime, most recently in setting up my research pipeline on the Flux high-performance compute cluster at The University of Michigan.

Installing NumPy is usually no trouble at all, but for some reason (if you know, please tell me), SciPy has always given me a "BlasNotFoundError" when installing on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distros commonly used on academic clusters.

> pip install scipy
Downloading/unpacking scipy
  Downloading scipy-0.12.0.zip (10.2MB): 100% 10.2MB downloaded
...
numpy.distutils.system_info.BlasNotFoundError:
    Blas (http://www.netlib.org/blas/) libraries not found.
    Directories to search for the libraries can be specified in the
    numpy/distutils/site.cfg file (section [blas]) or by setting
    the BLAS environment variable.

I know BLAS and LAPACK are installed as shared libraries: at Michigan State University I had to load the respective modules, but at UMich they're right there in /usr/lib64/atlas. So why pip install SciPy always gives me that error, I have no clue. I've set the BLAS and LAPACK environmental variables to the relevant shared libraries. I've run python setup.py build --fcompiler=gnu95 directly. But I always got that same error.

Anyway, I finally got it to work, so I thought I'd share the steps I took just in case it helps someone else. My solution was found on Stack Overflow (surprise, surprise): The accepted answer to this question.

mkdir -p ~/.local/src/
cd ~/.local/src/
wget -O BLAS.tgz http://www.netlib.org/blas/blas.tgz
tar -xzf BLAS.tgz
cd BLAS
gfortran -O3 -std=legacy -m64 -fno-second-underscore -fPIC -c *.f
ar r libfblas.a *.o
ranlib libfblas.a
export BLAS=$PWD/libfblas.a

cd ~/.local/src/
wget -O LAPACK.tgz http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapack.tgz
tar -xzf LAPACK.tgz
# The resulting directory may be named lapack-<version>/
# the following assumes that it's named LAPACK/
cd LAPACK
cp INSTALL/make.inc.gfortran make.inc
vim make.inc
# Change OPTS = -O2 to OPTS = -O2 -fPIC
# Change NOOPT = -O0 to NOOPT = -O0 -fPIC
make lapacklib
export LAPACK=$PWD/libflapack.a

cd ~/.local/src/
git clone https://github.com/scipy/scipy.git
cd scipy
python setup.py build --fcompiler gnu95
python setup.py install
# Assuming you're already in the virtualenv you want to install to.

I don't know which other systems this will work on, but it does successfully install SciPy for me. On Python 3.3.2, running the unit tests give me several errors and failures (nothing too scary looking), but everything passes on Python 2.7.5!

Enjoy.