ScaLAPACK

ScaLAPACK (Scalable LAPACK) is a linear algebra library for parallel computers. Routines are available to diagonalize or solve dense and narrow band systems of linear equations.

ScaLAPACK implements block-oriented LAPACK linear algebra routines, adding a special set of communication routines to copy blocks of data between processors as required. Similar to LAPACK, a single subroutine call typically carries out the necessary computations.

ScaLAPACK installations include the following libraries: scalapack, redist, pblas, tools, blacs, blacsCinit, and blacsF77init.

An meeting with Professor Choi J.

I finally met Prof. Choi J. which a member of ScaLAPACK team on the 23th of June, 2008 and, He agreed to teach me some advanced topics in mathematics. I have been hearing about him for quite a long time.

• Written in Fortran77 with a few in C
• Covers dense and band matrices, not general sparse matrices
• Written in a Single-Program-Multiple-Data style using explicit message passing for inter-processor communication.
• Assumes matrices are laid out in a two-dimensional block cyclic decomposition.
  

Lastly, I heard that the Hama is worthwhile to continue the research on the basis of the ScaLAPACK’s ideas.

Some Performance Report

• Performance data for Version 1.4 of ScaLAPACK on four distributed memory computers and two networks of workstations
  

RScaLAPACK

Note that the following result is based on an internal, rudimentary experiment.