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BLACS Warning and Error Messages

All BLACS warning messages are printed by the internal routine BlacsWarn, and all BLACS error messages are printed by the internal routine BlacsErr. The only real difference between BlacsWarn and BlacsErr is that BlacsErr calls BLACS_ABORT after the message is printed.

With these central routines handling BLACS error messages, it should be relatively easy for the programmer to modify error handling if the default routines are not adequate for his needs. One particularly annoying problem is that on many systems a print to the screen takes a long time to finish. BlacsErr may then kill the machine before the print reaches the screen, and the error message is lost. In this case, the user may wish to make BlacsErr wait before killing, or not kill at all, for instance.

BLACS warning messages have the following form:

BLACS WARNING '<explanation string>'
from {<p>,<q>}, pnum=<pnum>, Contxt=<ictxt>, on line <#> of file '<fname>'.

BLACS error messages have the following form:

BLACS ERROR '<explanation string>'
from {<p>,<q>}, pnum=<pnum>, Contxt=<ictxt>, on line <#> of file '<fname>'.

The meaning of these parameters are as follows:

Not all of this information may be available at the time an error or warning is issued. For instance, if the error occurs before the creation of the grid, the process grid coordinates will be unavailable. For any value that the BLACS cannot figure out, a -1 is printed to indicate that the value is unknown.

Examples of these BLACS error messages can be found on the BLACS homepage
(http://www.netlib.org/blacs/index.html) or in ``A User's Guide to the BLACS'' [54].


next up previous contents index
Next: System Error Messages Up: Error Handling in the Previous: Error Handling in the

Susan Blackford
Tue May 13 09:21:01 EDT 1997