BLACS

About BLACS.

The Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms (BLACS) library is included in the Intel MKL library, but it has also been downloaded from NETLIB and installed on Stallo.

The BLACS project is an ongoing investigation whose purpose is to create a linear algebra oriented message passing interface that may be implemented efficiently and uniformly across a large range of distributed memory platforms.

To learn more about BLACS, pleas consult the Intel MKL section, the BLACS User's Guide and the BLACS home page at NETLIB (some of the documentation on the BLACS home page is available as Postscript files. If you are not able to open Postscripte files you can use the ps2pdf command on Stallo to convert these files to PDF).

Using BLACS on Stallo:

First of all: as stated above, BLACS is part of the Intel MKL library which usually should give you a better performance than the NETLIB version. Please consult  the Intel MKL section about using BLACS with MKL.

The NETLIB version of BLACS is installed under /global/apps/netlib/lib/:

/global/apps/netlib/lib/libmpiblacs.a
/global/apps/netlib/lib/libmpiblacsC.a
/global/apps/netlib/lib/libmpiblacsF77.a

To be able to use the NETLIB version of BLACS you must load the NETLIB module on Stallo:

module load netlib

You must run this command before you try to link you application with this library.
And you may have to add this command after the PBS-stuff and before the executable stuff in your job script.