Expanding the Server Capabilities

It is possible to add new functionalities to a NetSolve computational server by specifying additional problem description files in the server configuration file. In fact, a number of PDFs have been written for a variety of serial and parallel software packages: ARPACK, Aztec, BLAS, ITPACK, LAPACK, MA28, PETSc, ScaLAPACK, and SuperLU. These PDFs are available in the $NETSOLVE_ROOT/problems/ directory. If a user has one of these software libraries compiled on the architecture to which he is installing NetSolve, he can easily add this functionality to his server in three steps.

NoteNote
 

If you are enabling sparse_iterative_sovle or sparse_direct_solve, you will need to type make wrappers followed by make server.

NetSolve's distributed memory services (e.g., ScaLAPACK, PETSc) are spawned using MPI (mpirun -machinefile MPImachines ...) and thus require an MPI machine file describing the parallel machine on which to run. The name of the file containing this list of homogeneous machines is called $NETSOLVE_ROOT/MPImachines and is referenced in the file $NETSOLVE_ROOT/server_config for configuring the server. Therefore, if you are enabling parallel services within a server, the user MUST edit this $NETSOLVE_ROOT/MPImachines file to list the specific machines to be used. The current implementation of NetSolve allows only one MPImachines file per server. This spawning file is tied to the server, and not to a specific service enabled. Thus, unfortunately, if you wish to enable parallel services on different clusters, then you must enable the software on different servers -- i.e., maintain a separate NetSolve source code tree for each server enablement so that each parallel service can have its own MPImachines file from which to spawn. A future release of NetSolve should identify a separate MPImachines file with each parallel service that can be enabled.

Enabling the LAPACK library

To enable LAPACK within NetSolve, one must perform the following steps:

Enabling the ScaLAPACK library

To enable ScaLAPACK within NetSolve, one must perform the following steps.

Enabling Sparse Iterative Solvers (PETSc, Aztec, and ITPACK)

NetSolve offers a 'sparse_iterative_solve' service as a convenient interface to sparse iterative methods packages such as PETSc, Aztec, and ITPACK. If the user would like to enable PETSc, Aztec, or ITPACK within NetSolve, he must perform the following steps.

Enabling Sparse Direct Solvers (SuperLU and MA28)

NetSolve offers a 'sparse_direct_solve' service as a convenient interface to sparse direct methods packages such as SuperLU and MA28. If the user would like to enable SuperLU or MA28 within NetSolve, he must perform the following steps.