SDSC "atlas" roll

Overview

This Rocks roll bundles the ATLAS math package.

The Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software (ATLAS) focuses on applying empirical techniques in order to provide portable performance. At present, it provides C and Fortran77 interfaces to a portably efficient BLAS implementation, as well as a few routines from LAPACK.

For more information about ATLAS please visit the official web page.

Requirements

To build/install this roll you must have root access to a Rocks development machine (e.g., a frontend or development appliance).

If your Rocks development machine does not have Internet access you must download the appropriate atlas source file(s) using a machine that does have Internet access and copy them into the src/atlas directory on your Rocks development machine.

Dependencies

yum install cpufrequtils

The sdsc-roll must be installed on the build machine, since the build process depends on make include files provided by that roll.

The roll sources assume that modulefiles provided by SDSC compiler rolls are available, but it will build without them as long as the environment variables they provide are otherwise defined.

Building

To build the atlas-roll, execute this on a Rocks development machine (e.g., a frontend or development appliance):

% make 2>&1 | tee build.log

A successful build will create the file atlas-*.disk1.iso. If you built the roll on a Rocks frontend, proceed to the installation step. If you built the roll on a Rocks development appliance, you need to copy the roll to your Rocks frontend before continuing with installation.

This roll source supports building with different compilers. The ROLLCOMPILER make variable can be used to specify the names of compiler modulefiles to use for building the software, e.g.,

% make ROLLCOMPILER=intel 2>&1 | tee build.log

The build process recognizes "gnu", "intel" or "pgi" as the value for the ROLLCOMPILER variable. The default value is "gnu".

This roll also supports the ROLLOPTS make variable. If it contains 'avx', options are passed to the compiler to produce AVX instructions.

Installation

To install, execute these instructions on a Rocks frontend:

% rocks add roll *.iso
% rocks enable roll atlas
% cd /export/rocks/install
% rocks create distro

Subsequent installs of compute and login nodes will then include the contents of the atlas-roll. To avoid cluttering the cluster frontend with unused software, the atlas-roll is configured to install only on compute and login nodes. To force installation on your frontend, run this command after adding the atlas-roll to your distro

% rocks run roll atlas host=NAME | bash

where NAME is the DNS name of a compute or login node in your cluster.

Note that the optimization techniques used by ATLAS dictate only installing the package on systems with the same architecture and configuration as the build machine.

In addition to the software itself, the roll installs ATLAS environment module files in:

/opt/modulefiles/applications/atlas.

Testing

The atlas-roll includes a test script which can be run to verify proper installation of the roll documentation, binaries and module files. To run the test scripts execute the following command(s):

% /root/rolltests/atlas.t