Travis:
This material was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor the United States Department of Energy, nor Battelle, nor any of their employees, MAKES ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, OR ASSUMES ANY LEGAL LIABILITY OR RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR USEFULNESS OF ANY INFORMATION, APPARATUS, PRODUCT, SOFTWARE, OR PROCESS DISCLOSED, OR REPRESENTS THAT ITS USE WOULD NOT INFRINGE PRIVATELY OWNED RIGHTS.
This software and its documentation were produced with United States Government support under Contract Number DE-AC06-76RLO-1830 awarded by the United States Department of Energy. The United States Government retains a paid-up non-exclusive, irrevocable worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, perform publicly and display publicly by or for the US Government, including the right to distribute to other US Government contractors.
The primary current source of funding for development of GA is the Exascale Computing Project. https://exascaleproject.org/
If the configure script is not present, run ./autogen.sh. It will install the necessary versions of autoconf, automake, and libtool into an autotools subdirectory and then run autoreconf automatically to generate the configure script.
The command::
./configure && make && make install
should compile the static GA library (libga.a) to use MPI two-sided communication primitives and install headers and libraries to /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib, respectively.
Please refer to the INSTALL file for generic build instructions. That is a good place to start if you are new to using "configure; make; make install" types of builds. Detailed instructions are covered later in this file.
Please submit issues to our GitHub issue tracker. We use Google Groups to host our discussion forum, or send an email to [email protected] as an alias for that group.
The GA webpage has the most current versions of the Fortran and C documentation and the User's Manual in the HTML format.
This directory contains the Global Arrays (GA), Communications Runtime for Exascale (ComEx) run-time library, Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI) run-time library, Memory Allocator (MA), parallel I/O libraries (DRA,EAF,SF), TCGMSG, and TCGMSG-MPI packages bundled together.
Global Arrays is a portable Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) shared-memory programming environment for distributed and shared memory computers. It augments the message-passing model by providing a shared-memory like access to distributed dense arrays. This is also known as the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model.
ARMCI provides one-sided remote memory operations used by GA.
DRA (Disk Resident Arrays) is a parallel I/O library that maintains dense two-dimensional arrays on disk.
SF (Shared Files) is a parallel I/O library that allows noncollective I/O to a parallel file.
EAF (Exclusive Access Files) is parallel I/O library that supports I/O to private files.
TCGMSG is a simple, efficient, but obsolete message-passing library.
TCGMSG-MPI is a TCGMSG interface implementation on top of MPI and ARMCI.
MA is a dynamic memory allocator/manager for Fortran and C programs.
GA++ is a C++ binding for global arrays.
See file 'COPYRIGHT' for copying conditions. See file 'INSTALL' for compilation and installation instructions (generic). See file 'CHANGELOG.md' for a list of major changes in the current release.
Please refer to the INSTALL file for generic build instructions. That is a good place to start if you are new to using "configure; make; make install" types of builds. The following will cover platform-specific considerations as well as the various optional features of GA. Customizations to the GA build via the configure script are discussed next.
There are many options available when configuring GA. Although configure can be safely run within this distributions' root folder, we recommend performing an out-of-source (aka VPATH) build. This will cleanly separate the generated Makefiles and compiled object files and libraries from the source code. This will allow, for example, one build using MPI two-sided versus another build using OpenIB for the communication layer to use the same source tree e.g.:
mkdir bld_mpi_ts && cd bld_mpi_ts && ../configure
mkdir bld_mpi_openib && cd bld_mpi_openib && ../configure --with-openib
Regardless of your choice to perform a VPATH build, the following should hopefully elucidate the myriad options to configure. Only the options requiring additional details are documented here. ./configure --help will certainly list more options in addition to limited documentation.
--disable-f77 Disable Fortran code. This used to be the old
GA_C_CORE or NOFORT environment variables which
enabled the C++ bindings. However, it is severely
broken. There are certain cases where Fortran code is
required but this will not inhibit the building of the
C++ bindings. In the future we may be able to
eliminate the need for the Fortran compiler/linker.
Use at your own risk (of missing symbols at link-time.)
--enable-cxx Build C++ interface. This will require the C++ linker
to locate the Fortran libraries (handled
automatically) but user C++ code will require the same
considerations (C++ linker, Fortran libraries.)
--disable-opt Don't use hard-coded optimization flags. GA is a
highly-optimized piece of software. There are certain
optimization levels or flags that are known to break
the software. If you experience mysterious faults,
consider rebuilding without optimization by using this
option.
--enable-peigs Enable Parallel Eigensystem Solver interface. This
will build the stubs required to call into the peigs
library (external).
--enable-checkpoint Enable checkpointing. Untested. For use with old
X-based visualization tool.
--enable-profile Enable profiling. Not sure what this does, sorry.
--enable-trace Enable tracing. Not sure what this does, sorry.
--enable-underscoring Force single underscore for all external Fortran
symbols. Usually, configure is able to detect the name
mangling scheme of the detected Fortran compiler and
will default to using what is detected. This includes
any variation of zero, one, or two underscores or
whether UPPERCASE or lowercase symbols are used. If
you want to force a single underscore which was the
default of older GA builds, use this option.
Otherwise, you can use the FFLAGS environment variable
to override the Fortran compiler's or platform's
defaults e.g. configure FFLAGS=-fno-underscoring.
--enable-i4 Use 4 bytes for Fortran INTEGER size. Otherwise, the
default INTEGER size is set to the results of the C
sizeof(void*) operator.
--enable-i8 Use 8 bytes for Fortran INTEGER size. Otherwise, the
default INTEGER size is set to the results of the C
sizeof(void*) operator.
--enable-shared Build shared libraries [default=no]. Useful, for
example, if you plan on wrapping GA with an
interpreted language such as Python. Otherwise, some
systems only support static libraries (or vice versa)
but static libraries are the default.
For most of the external software packages an optional argument is allowed (represented as ARG below.) ARG can be omitted or can be one or more whitespace-separated directories, linker or preprocessor directives. For example::
--with-mpi="/path/to/mpi -lmylib -I/mydir"
--with-mpi=/path/to/mpi/base
--with-mpi=-lmpich
The messaging libraries supported include MPI, TCGMSG, and TCGMSG over MPI. If you omit their respective --with- option, MPI is the default. GA can be built to work with MPI or TCGMSG. Since the TCGMSG package is small (comparing to portable MPI implementations), compiles fast, it is still bundled with the GA package.
--with-mpi=ARG Select MPI as the messaging library (default). If you
omit ARG, we attempt to locate the MPI compiler
wrappers. If you supply anything for ARG, we will
parse ARG as indicated above.
--with-tcgmsg Select TCGMSG as the messaging library; if
--with-mpi is also specified then TCGMSG over MPI is
used.
--with-blas=ARG Use external BLAS library; attempt to detect
sizeof(INTEGER) used to compile BLAS; if not found, an
internal BLAS is built
--with-blas4=ARG Use external BLAS library compiled with
sizeof(INTEGER)==4
--with-blas8=ARG Use external BLAS library compiled with
sizeof(INTEGER)==8
--with-lapack=ARG Use external LAPACK library. If not found, an internal
one is built.
--with-scalapack=ARG Use external ScaLAPACK library.
There are some influential environment variables as documented in configure --help, however there are a few that are special to GA.
- F77_INT_FLAG
Fortran compiler flag to set the default INTEGER size. We know about certain
Fortran flags that set the default INTEGER size, but there will certainly be
some new (or old) ones that we don't know about. If the configure test to
determine the correct flag fails, please try setting this variable and
rerunning configure.
- F2C_HIDDEN_STRING_LENGTH_AFTER_ARGS
If cross compiling, set to either "yes" (default) or "no" (after string).
For compatibility between Fortran and C, a Fortran subroutine written in C
that takes a character string must take an additional argument (one per
character string) indicating the length of the string. This 'hidden'
argument appears either immediately after the string in the argument list
or after all other arguments to the function. This is compiler dependent. We
attempt to detect this behavior automatically, but in the case of
cross-compiled systems it may be necessary to specify the less usual after
string convention the gaf2c/testarg program crashes.
BLAS, being a Fortran library, can be compiled with a default INTEGER size of 4 or a promoted INTEGER size of 8. Experience has shown us that most of the time the default size of INTEGER used is 4. In some cases, however, you may have an external BLAS library which is using 8-byte INTEGERs. In order to correctly interface with an external BLAS library, GA must know the size of INTEGER used by the BLAS library.
configure has the following BLAS-related options: --with-blas, --with-blas4, and --with-blas8. The latter two will force the INTEGER size to 4- or 8-bytes, respectively. The first option, --with-blas, defaults to 4-byte INTEGERS however in the two special cases of using ACML or MKL, it is possible to detect 8-byte INTEGERs automatically. As documented in the ACML manual, if the path to the library has _int64 then 8-byte INTEGERs are used. As documented in the MKL manual, if the library is ilp64, then 8-byte INTEGERs are used.
You may always override --with-blas by specifying the INTEGER size using one of the two more specific options.
Certain platforms cross-compile from a login node for a compute node, or one might choose to cross-compile for other reasons. Cross-compiling requires the use of the --host option to configure which indicates to configure that certain run-time tests should not be executed. See INSTALL for details on use of the --host option.
Two of our target platforms are known to require cross-compilation, Cray XT and IBM Blue Gene.
It has been noted that configure still succeeds without the use of the --host flag. If you experience problems without --host, we recommend
configure --host=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
And if that doesn't work (cross-compilation is not detected) you must then force cross-compilation using both --host and --build together:
configure --host=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --build=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Unless otherwise noted you can try to overwrite the default compiler names detected by configure by defining F77, CC, and CXX for Fortran (77), C, and C++ compilers, respectively. Or when using the MPI compilers MPIF77, MPICC, and MPICXX for MPI Fortran (77), C, and C++ compilers, respectively:
configure F77=f90 CC=gcc
configure MPIF77=mpif90 MPICC=mpicc
Although you can change the compiler at make-time it will likely fail. Many platform-specific compiler flags are detected at configure-time based on the compiler selection. If changing compilers, we recommend rerunning configure as above.
By this point we assume you have successfully run configure either from the base distribution directory or from a separate build directory (aka VPATH build.) You are now ready to run 'make'. You can optionally run parallel make using the "-j" option which significantly speeds up the build. If using the MPI compiler wrappers, occasionally using "-j" will cause build failures because the MPI compiler wrapper creates a temporary symlink to the mpif.h header. In that case, you won't be able to use the "-j" option. Further, the influential environment variables used at configure-time can be overridden at make-time in case problems are encountered. For example::
./configure CFLAGS=-Wimplicit
...
make CFLAGS="-Wimplicit -g -O0"
One particularly influential make variable is "V" which controls the verbosity of the make output. This variable corresponds to the --disable-silent-rules/--enable-silent-riles configure-time option, but we recommend the make-time variable:
make V=0 (configure --enable-silent-rules)
make V=1 (configure --disable-silent-rules)
Running "make checkprogs" will build most test and example programs. Note that not all tests are built -- some tests depend on certain features being detected or enabled during configure. These programs are not intented to be examples of good GA coding practices because they often include private headers. However, they help us debug or time our GA library.
Running "make check" will build most test and example programs (See "make checkprogs" notes above) in addition to running the test suite. The test suite runs both the serial and parallel tests. The test suite must know how to launch the parallel tests via the MPIEXEC variable. Please read your MPI flavor's documentation on how to launch, or if using TCGMSG you will use the "parallel" tool. For example, the following is the command to launch the test suite when compiled with OpenMPI:
make check MPIEXEC="mpiexec -np 4"
All tests have a per-test log file containing the output of the test. So if the test is global/testing/test.x, the log file would be global/testing/test.log. The output of failed tests is collected in the top-level log summary test-suite.log.
The test suite will recurse into the ComEx directory and run the ComEx test suite first. If the ComEx test suite fails, the GA test suite will not run (the assumption here is that you should fix bugs in the dependent library first.) To run only the GA test suite, type "make check-ga" with the appropriate MPIEXEC variable.
Setting an environment variable MA_USE_ARMCI_MEM forces MA library to use ARMCI memory, communication via which can be faster on networks like GM, VIA and InfiniBand.