Prerequisites

The following base libraries are needed:

BLAS

The Basic Linear Algebra subprograms [10,10,17]. Many vendors provide optimized versions; if no vendor version is available for a given platform, the ATLAS software (http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/) may be employed. The reference BLAS from Netlib (http://www.netlib.org/blas) are meant to define the standard behaviour of the BLAS interface, so they are not optimized for any particular plaftorm, and should only be used as a last resort. Note that BLAS computation form a relatively small part of the MLD2P4/PSBLAS computations; they are however critical when using preconditioners based on the UMFPACK or SuperLU third party libraries.

MPI

A version of MPI [16,21] is available on most high performance computing system; only version 1.1 is required.

BLACS

The Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subroutines [12] are available in source form from http://www.netlib.org/blacs; some vendors include them in their parallel computing support libraries.

PSBLAS

Parallel Sparse BLAS [14,15] is available from
http://www.ce.uniroma2.it/psblas; indeed, all the prerequisites listed so far are also prerequisites of PSBLAS. Version 2.3 (or later) is required. To build the MLD2P4 library it is necessary to get access to the source PSBLAS directory employed to build the version under use; after the MLD2P4 build process completes, only the compiled form of the PSBLAS library is necessary to build user applications.

Please note that the four previous libraries must have Fortran interfaces compatible with MLD2P4; usually this means that they should all be built with the same compiler as MLD2P4.