Experimental support is now available for Julia on power8 little endian architectures running linux - ppc64le.
Precompiled
binaries
for Julia 0.5-pre are available. Make sure to download libtatlas.so
from there and put it on your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
The latest release of ATLAS on most linux distributions is buggy on Power and using the provided binary is preferable. The next stable release of ATLAS (3.10.3) should fix all known issues, but it may be a while before an update is available on popular linux distros.
Note that these are unofficial binaries and contributed strictly for convenience. They may or may not work for you, and have not gone through the same rigour as official binaries.
Since OpenBLAS power support is still in the works, we use ATLAS as a system provided BLAS for now through a custom Make.user file:
override USE_SYSTEM_BLAS = 1
override USE_BLAS64 = 0
override LIBBLAS = -L/usr/lib64/atlas -ltatlas
override LIBBLASNAME = libtatlas