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.
   http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/examples/example1.f
3. Download the prebuilt ScaLAPACK library (about 3MB) for the specific architecture into directory SCALAPACK (e.g., SUN4SOL2) and uncompress.
   http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/archives/scalapack_SUN4SOL2.tar.gz

         gunzip scalapack_SUN4SOL2.tar.gz
         tar xvf scalapack_SUN4SOL2.tar
         rm scalapack_SUN4SOL2.tar

   (Note that this tar file contains the library archive and the SLmake.inc used to build the library. Details of compiler flags, etc. can be found in this make include file.)
4. Download the prebuilt BLACS library (about 60 KB) for the architecture (e.g., SUN4SOL2) and message-passing layer (e.g., MPICH), and uncompress into directory SCALAPACK.
   http://www.netlib.org/blacs/archives/blacs_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.tar.gz

         gunzip blacs_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.tar.gz
         tar xvf blacs_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.tar
         rm blacs_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.tar

   (Note that this tar file contains the library archive(s) and the Bmake.inc used to build the library. Details of compiler flags, etc. can be found in this make include file.)
5. Find the optimized BLAS library on the specific architecture.
   

   If not available, download reference implementation (about 1 MB) into directory SCALAPACK/BLAS, compile, and build the library.

           mkdir BLAS
           cd BLAS

   Download http://www.netlib.org/blas/blas.shar.

           sh blas.shar
           f77 -O -f -c *.f
           ar cr ../blas_SUN4SOL2.a *.o
           cd ..

   (Note that this reference implementation of the BLAS will not deliver high performance.)
6. Compile and link to prebuilt libraries.

       sun4sol2> f77 -f -o example1 example1.f scalapack_SUN4SOL2.a \
                 blacsF77init_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.a blacs_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.a \
                 blacsF77init_MPI-SUN4SOL2-0.a blas_SUN4SOL2.a \
                 $MPI_ROOT/lib/solaris/ch_p4/libmpi.a -lnsl -lsocket
       example1.f:
        MAIN example1:
              matinit:

   Note that the -lnsl -lsocket libraries are machine specific to Solaris. Refer to the SLmake.inc for details. MPICH can be found in the directory $MPI_ROOT. On our system we did

       sun4sol2> setenv MPI_ROOT /src/icl/MPI/mpich

7. Run the ScaLAPACK example program.

   To run an MPI program with MPICH, one will need to add $MPI_ROOT/bin to the path. On our system we did

       sun4sol2> set path = ($path $MPI_ROOT/bin)

   To run the example:

       sun4sol2> mpirun -np 6 example1

   The example runs on six processes and prints out a statement that ``the solution is correct'' or ``the solution is incorrect''.