ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

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BlockSolve v1.1:
Scalable Library Software for the
Parallel Solution of Sparse Linear Systems

MARK T. JONES AND PAUL E. PLASSMANN

Mathematics and Computer Science Division

ANL Report 92/46

December 1992

ABSTRACT

BlockSolve is a software library for solving large, sparse systems of linear equations on massively parallel computers. The matrices must be symmetric, but may have an arbitrary sparsity structure. BlockSolve is a portable package that is compatible with several different message-passing pardigms. This report gives detailed instructions on the use of BlockSolve in applications programs.

This work was supported by the Office of Scientific Computing, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31-109-Eng-38.

• Contents
• Introduction
• Algorithm Descriptions
• Using BlockSolve
  • The Context
  • The User Matrix Data Structure
  • Manipulating and Solving Matrices
    • Manipulation and Setup
    • Solving the Linear System
  • Error Checking within BlockSolve
  • Message Number Conflicts
• Installation and Testing
  • Other Libraries
  • Availability of BlockSolve
• Limitations and Future Plans
• Acknowledgment
• References
• About this document ...