ALUGrid library
===================

License
-------

The ALUGrid library and headers are licensed under the GNU General
Public License (GPL) version 2. The full license text can be found 
in the file COPYING and via http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html .


Compiler 
--------

The ALUGrid code in known to compile with the GNU Compiler version 3.4.x or higher. 
Also with the INTEL C++ Compiler version 8.1 or higher the code compiles.
Furthermore the code compiles with the IBM xlC compiler version 6 or higher. 

The compiler can be chosen by editing the fields COMP and CXXCOMP in the
*.opts files. For parallel computations the MPI compiler, like mpiCC should
be used or the include path and lib path adapted. 


Getting started
---------------

To compile the library ALUGrid has to check several components of
your system. Run

  ./configure

to commence those tests. See ./configure --help for detail help on options. 
If you intend to use the parallel version of the
grid, make sure that you have a version of MPI, 
and METIS (--with-metis=PATH) or  
PARTY (--with-party=PATH) and supply the respective flags to the 
configure script. Dynamic load balancing can only be used 
if either METIS, or PARTY Lib (or more than one) are linked to the ALUGrid Library.

For parallel computation the C bindings of MPI are needed, 
common packages are OpenMPI (version 1.1.x), MPICH (version 1.2.5 or higher), 
or LAM MPI (version 7.x). 
To compile the parallel version of the library use the 
$MPICC compiler script (i.e. mpicc -show or mpicc -showme)
to obtain pre-processor flags and linker flags to add to 
the CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS variable. 
Alternatively, you can use the MPI C++ compiler script to compile the code
(i.e. ./configure CXX=mpiCC ....). In this case the libmpicxx will 
also be linked to the libalugrid.a although not needed. 

For example to compile the parallel version of ALUGrid the configure
command can look as follows: 

./configure CXX=g++ CXXFLAGS="`mpicc -showme:compile`" LDFLAGS="`mpicc -showme:link`" --with-metis="metis_path" --with-party="partylib_path"

or 

./configure CXX=mpiCC --with-metis="metis_path" --with-party="partylib_path"

For METIS (version 4.0 or higher)  
see http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/views/metis/metis/ .
For PARTY Lib (version 1.99) see 
http://wwwcs.upb.de/fachbereich/AG/monien/RESEARCH/PART/party.html .

You can use

  ./configure --prefix=PATH

if you don't want ALUGrid to be installed into the default directory
(i.e. the path were ALUGrid was unpacked).

After configuration

  make
  make install

build and install ALUGrid.  


Dynamic Load Balancing Options
------------------------------

If the compiled code is used for parallel computations including dynamic
load balancing, then a parameter file named "alugrid.cfg" should be
available in the directory the program is launched. See
"misc/alugrid.cfg" for an example file. 

The file must contain three values: 
first row:  ldb_under (value < 1.0),  default value is 0.0
second row: ldb_over (value > 1.0),   default value is 1.2 
third row: Graph partitioning method, default method is 11 (METIS_PartGraphKway)

Available methods are: 

NONE = 0
COLLECT = 1 (collect all elements to process 0)

PARTY_helpfulSet = 3
PARTY_kernighanLin = 4
PARTY_random = 5
PARTY_scattered = 6
PARTY_linear = 7
PARTY_breathfirst = 8
PARTY_cutfirst = 9

METIS_PartGraphKway = 11
METIS_PartGraphRecursive = 12


See the documentation of the corresponding package for detail on the
methods. 


Debug Options
--------------

There are several debug options that can be set an shell environment
variable and that forces the code to produce debug output. To use this
feature, the code must be compiled without the CPP variable NDEBUG set. 
The following shell environment variables can be set to a level of 
verbosity (higher is better).

VERBOSE      general verbose output  
VERBOSE_MGB  output produced by the macro grid builder 
VERBOSE_LDB  output produced while partitioning. 
VERBOSE_PLL  output produced by parallel grid methods


Optimization 
-------------

The ALUGrid code is highly riddled with assert statements. 
Therefore it is recommended to compile the library and the application code
with the CPP variable NDEBUG set (i.e. -DNDEBUG) to avoid all asserts
statement tests. 

Known bugs: On Intel ia64 architectures the optimisation option -O3 doesn't
work with the INTEL C++ Compiler. 


Debug
-----

For debugging the code the preprocessor variable NDEBUG must not be defined
and additionally the preprocessor variable DEBUG_ALUGRID can be defined
for object reference counting. In the read method of the message
buffer for parallel computations a eof check is done on every read
which can be disabled by passing the preprocessor variable
NO_OBJECTSTREAM_DEBUG.


Knowns Bugs 
-----------

ALUGrid does not work with Myrinet MPI. Up to now we couldn't figure
out what exactly the problem is.