2. Getting Started with ScaLAPACK
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 1997
This chapter provides the background information to enable users to call ScaLAPACK software, together with a simple example program. The chapter begins by presenting a set of instructions to execute a ScaLAPACK example program, followed by the source code of Example Program #1. A detailed explanation of the example program is given, and finally the necessary steps to call a ScaLAPACK routine are described by referencing the example program. For an explanation of the terminology used within this chapter, please refer to the List of Notation and/or Glossary at the beginning of this book. 2.1 How to Run an Example Program Using MPI This section presents the instructions for installing ScaLAPACK and running a simple example program in parallel. The example assumes that the underlying system is a Sun Solaris system; the problem is run on one physical processor, using six processes that do message passing. The example uses MPI as the message-passing layer. The version of MPI used in this example is MPICH (version 1.0.13), and we assume the user has this version installed. MPICH is a freely available, portable implementation of MPI. If MPICH is not installed, refer to http://www.netlib.org/mpi/. If this is run on a different architecture, the user will have to make a number of changes. In particular, the prebuilt libraries will have to be changed. If prebuilt libraries do not exist for the specific architecture, the user will need to download the source (http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/scalapack.tar.gz) and build them. To use ScaLAPACK for the first time (on a network of workstations using MPI), one should 1. Make a directory for this testing. mkdir SCALAPACK cd SCALAPACK 2. Download the ScaLAPACK example program (about 7 KB) into directory SCALAPACK.