PSBLAS library, version 3.5

The architecture of the Fortran 2003 sparse BLAS is described in:

S. Filippone, A. Buttari. Object-Oriented Techniques for Sparse Matrix Computations in Fortran 2003, ACM Trans. on Math. Software, vol. 38, No. 4, 2012.

The ideas are explored further with the paper:

V. Cardellini, S. Filippone and D. Rouson. Design Patterns for sparse-matrix computations on hybrid CPU/GPU platforms, Scientific Programming, 22(2014), pp.1-19.

Version 1.0 of the library is described in:

S. Filippone, M. Colajanni. PSBLAS: A library for parallel linear algebra computation on sparse matrices, ACM Trans. on Math. Software, 26(4), Dec. 2000, pp. 527-550.

UTILITIES

The test/util directory contains some utilities to convert to/from Harwell-Boeing and MatrixMarket file formats.

DOCUMENTATION

See docs/psblas-3.5.pdf; an HTML version of the same document is available in docs/html. Please consult the sample programs, especially test/pargen/psb_[sd]_pde[23]d.f90

OTHER SOFTWARE CREDITS

We originally included a modified implementation of some of the Sparker (serial sparse BLAS) material; this has been completely rewritten, way beyond the intention(s) and responsibilities of the original developers. The main reference for the serial sparse BLAS is:

Duff, I., Marrone, M., Radicati, G., and Vittoli, C. Level 3 basic linear algebra subprograms for sparse matrices: a user level interface, ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 23(3), 379-401, 1997.

INSTALLING

To compile and run our software you will need the following prerequisites (see also SERIAL below):

1. A working version of MPI

2. A version of the BLAS; if you don't have a specific version for your platform you may try ATLAS available from http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/

3. We have had good results with the METIS library, from http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/metis/metis/main.html. This is optional; it is used in the util and test/fileread directories but only if you specify --with-metis.

4. If you have the AMD package of Davis, Duff and Amestoy, you can specify --with-amd (see ./configure --help for more details).

The configure script will generate a Make.inc file suitable for building the library. The script is capable of recognizing the needed libraries with their default names; if they are in unusual places consider adding the paths with --with-libs, or explicitly specifying the names in --with-blas, etc. Please note that a common way for the configure script to fail is to specify inconsistent MPI vs. plain compilers, either directly or indirectly via environment variables; e.g. specifying the Intel compiler with FC=ifort while at the same time having an MPIFC=mpif90 which points to GNU Fortran. The best way to avoid this situation is (in our opinion) to use the environment modules package (see http://modules.sourceforge.net/), and load the relevant variables with (e.g.)

module load gnu46 openmpi

This will delegate to the modules setup to make sure that the version of openmpi in use is the one compiled with the gnu46 compilers. After the configure script has completed you can always tweak the Make.inc file yourself.

After you have Make.inc fixed, run

make

to compile the library; go to the test directory and its subdirectories to get test programs done. If you specify --prefix=/path you can do make install and the libraries will be installed under /path/lib, while the module files will be installed under /path/modules. The regular and experimental C interface header files are under /path/include.

SERIAL

Configuring with --enable-serial will provide a fake MPI stub library that enables running in pure serial mode; no MPI installation is needed in this case (but note that the fake MPI stubs are only guaranteed to cover what we use internally, it's not a complete replacement).

LONG INTEGERS

We have an experimental flag --enable-long-integers that will enable having 8-byte integer data, allowing an index space larger than 2G; some small cases have been tested but we do not offer full guarantee (yet).

TODO

Fix all reamining bugs. Bugs? We dont' have any ! ;-)

The PSBLAS team.

RELATED SOFTWARE

If you are looking for more sophisticated preconditioners, you may be interested in the package MLD2P4 from http://github.com/sfilippone/mld2p4-2

Contact: https://github.com/sfilippone/psblas3