Intel MKL FATAL ERROR upon importing Aesara on M1 Mac

[larryshamalama]

Importing Aesara yields the following error due to the mkl package.

Recreating the conda environment in environment.yml minus the mkl dependencies allows Aesara to be imported.

Given that mkl is an optional dependency, its removal altogether can be considered. Another option would be to replace it by blip as suggested by @dgerlanc

CC @brandonwillard

• Aesara version: 2.4.0
• Python version: 3.10.4
• Operating system: Mac Monterey (M1)
• How did you install Aesara: conda

[dgerlanc]

@brandonwillard We may want to add an environment-arm.yml without the mkl dependencies.

[dgerlanc]

I'm thinking we probably want to avoid importing MKL at all on ARM Mac if we're getting this failure on import.

[twiecki]

Is MKL a dependency? I thought I had removed it from conda-forge et al. In any case, it definitely should be optional

[dgerlanc]

I don't think it's a required dependency or my nomkl requirement here would resolve successfully.

It seems you may still be able to install MKL on OS X Arm with conda, and if it's found by aesara then Python will exit. In theory, you could also have openBLAS installed, and the symlink at ~/miniconda3/envs/aesara-dev/lib/libblas.dylib and
libcblas.dylib would determine the configured BLAS. For openBLAS, on my M1 Mac, with openBLAS configured, they both point to libopenblas_vortexp-r0.3.18.dylib (ignore the specific version as this will change with new release of openBLAS).

As far as I can tell, just having MKL present in an OS X Arm conda environment causes the interpreter to exit when aesara is imported. Granted, one shouldn't be installing MKL as it's not usable on OS X Arm, so it may not be unreasonable to raise an error if the package is found at all. However, we probably shouldn't exit the Python interpreter.

[brandonwillard]

This was effectively closed by #960, but we can still do something about the error message/warning.