Monday, August 28, 2006

Life as a Compiler

I spent the whole afternoon helping a PhD student from Physics Department with compiling the PARATEC library (a Fortran library of some quantum stuff that I've no idea at all) on ChinaGrid, where each node has dual Itanium CPUs, using Intel Fortran and C/C++ compilers. The configurations on the grid were a little confusing that ScalaPack, fftw, MKL, gcc, icc, BLAS, etc. all exist but no MPI versions. However, everything went quite well linking against MKL cluster edition though the library was designed to be compiled by pgf compiler. Remember that the functions "derf" and "derfc" should be renamed to "vderf" and "vderfc" when using Intel Fortran compiler, respectively, and don't mix gcc and icc.

The physics guy said that they had spent over a year on compiling this on ChinaGrid, gosh! Currently he's testing the program and checking the results. I agree with my boss that they do need something similar to nanoHUB to simplify scientific computing, or too much time would be wasted on getting over these meaningless obstacles.

While compiling the library I was talking to Sunny and tension on GTalk. They just went to Redondo Beach near Los Angeles with mingkong, waicha, etc., enjoying the sea, playing football and taking a lot of beautiful photos. Wow, I'm thinking about hanging around to take some photos of the rail on the east of the campus. That might be cool.

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