Topic: Standard Set of Libraries
Date Received: October 3, 2006

Topic: I'm part of the PET team at ARL and I'm helping some users build a code for a challenge project. They have a code (cp2k) that requires BLACS and SCALAPACK and asked me if I could get it running on JVN. They've been running on Eagle at ASC because it had all the prerequisites and building the code was trivial. At ARL however, the only versions of SCALAPACK and BLACS available were built with compilers several years old and it took me a couple days to figure out that the libraries were build at all. In order to get the code working, I have to rebuild (and test) both BLACS and SCALAPACK. This is significantly slowing me down and making the user wait.

Centers: I primarily work at ASC and ARL, but having a common library structure everywhere would be ideal.

BC Team Feedback
Reply Date: March 19, 2007

The Baseline Configuration (BC) Team has already addressed this issue in BC policy FY06-01 (Common Set of Open Source Math Libraries). BC policy FY06-01 defines a set of open-source math libraries and how they are maintained consistently across the participating centers.

The suite of maintained packages consists of the following:

  • ARPACK
  • FFTW
  • PETSc
  • SuperLU
  • ScaLAPACK
    • ATLAS (BLAS)
    • LAPACK
    • BLACS
  • SPRNG

The packages are installed and maintained as part of a consistent computational environment. The User Productivity Enhancement and Technology Transfer (PET) Computational Environments (CE) team manages this consistent environment. Each center provides a public directory in which the CE team has write permissions. This directory is accessible through the common environment variable $PET_HOME. Under this directory the CE team maintains a directory named "MATH." It is under this MATH directory that these open source math libraries are maintained.

Additional information on how to access the libraries can be found in the Baseline Configuration policy by visiting:

http://centers.hpc.mil/consolidated/bc/commonMath.html

Questions about the installation or use of these libraries can be directed to the PET CE team by sending email to pet-ce@cs.utk.edu.