Response #1: 2005-08-14

General

1. Is dense linear algebra a performance bottleneck in your applications?
Yes

2. How often do your applications use the arithmetic precisions listed below:

3. What dense matrix sizes are most important or time-consuming for your application?
1,000,000 or more X 100s

4. Does your application come close to, or run out of memory on important problems?
Yes

5. Number of processors used for your application:

6. Which architectures do you use or intend to use in the next three years?
Sequential, Multi-core-thread, Distributed-memory, Widely-distributed

8. Please rank how the following features would be useful to your current or planned applications?

9. Do your applications solve linear algebra problems of the type?
Linear positive definite systems, Generalized eigenvalue

LAPACK Usage

1. Do you use LAPACK (or a vendor version of LAPACK )?
Yes

4. If you use LAPACK, do you use a vendors version or one obtained directly from Netlib?
Netlib

6. Do your applications make direct LAPACK calls?
Yes

7. Do your applications use libraries which depend on LAPACK?
Yes

8. Do your applications use a higher-level interface to LAPACK?
No

10. Is the LAPACK procedure interface a barrier to more extensive use?
No

11. From which languages do you call LAPACK routines?
Fortran 77, Fortran 90/95

14. If you have installed LAPACK yourself, how could the installation process be improved?
1. I always compile and create the libraries manually. Provide a script or makefile that does just that. The official installation process is confusing and gets stuck. 2. provide standard ./configure make make install but make sure it actually works on (nearly) everything

15. How frequently do you refer to the LAPACK Users Guide?
Rarely

ScaLAPACK Usage

1. Do you use ScaLAPACK (or a vendor version of ScaLAPACK )?
Yes

4. If you use ScaLAPACK, do you use a vendors version or one obtained directly from Netlib?
Netlib

6. Do your applications make direct ScaLAPACK calls?
No

7. Do your applications use libraries which depend on ScaLAPACK?
No

8. Do your applications use a higher-level interface to ScaLAPACK?
Yes

9. If you answered yes above, which higher-level interfaces do you use?
writing our own

10. Is the ScaLAPACK procedure interface a barrier to more extensive use?
Yes

11. From which languages do you call ScaLAPACK routines?
Fortran 77

12. Please describe any tools or helper functions that you frequently implement to assist your applications in using ScaLAPACK?
own layer

13. How could the ScaLAPACK interface be improved to feel more natural to your application and implementation language?
object oriented

14. If you have installed ScaLAPACK yourself, how could the installation process be improved?
The installation is TERRIBLE beyond description and requires major work. Test it on a variety of machines before release!! And with various installations of MPI on the same machine! There is a mixture of "mpi.h" and in BLACS that makes installation fail if there is /usr/include/mpi.h which is different then specified in Bmake.inc Please provide standard ./configure make make install

15. How frequently do you refer to the ScaLAPACK Users Guide?
Very Frequently

16. What information in the ScaLAPACK guide is hard to find or is missing, if any?
The online guide is extremely confusing. For example the critical information that all matrices in operation must have same processor grid is not there. The comments in source are cryptic. It is unclear what is input and what is output.

Targeted Environment Specifics

1. Under which operating system environments do your applications run?
Linux, Solaris, Windows (cygwin), Windows (other)

3. If your applications run in a distributed-memory environment, which styles of parallelism do they employ?
Message passing

Additional Information