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Engineering Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) and Parallel ESSL

  

ESSL and Parallel ESSL are collections of state-of-the-art mathematical subroutines specifically designed to improve the performance of engineering and scientific applications on the IBM POWER™ processor-based servers and BladeCenter® JS21 and JS22 blades. ESSL and Parallel ESSL are commonly used in the aerospace, automotive, electronics, petroleum, utilities and scientific research industries for applications such as:

  • Structural Analysis
  • Time Series Analysis
  • Computational Chemistry
  • Computational Techniques
  • Fluid Dynamics Analysis
  • Mathematical Analysis
  
  • Seismic Analysis
  • Dynamic Systems Simulation
  • Reservoir Modeling
  • Nuclear Engineering
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Electronic Circuit Design

ESSL and Parallel ESSL support 32-bit and 64-bit Fortran, C and C++ applications running under AIX® and Linux®.

ESSL supports serial and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) applications on a single server running AIX, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Parallel ESSL supports Message-Passing Interface (MPI) applications running on:
  • Clusters of IBM POWER5 and BladeCenter JS21 servers connected with a Myrinet-2000 Switch running AIX, SLES or RHEL.
  • Clusters of IBM POWER5™ or POWER4™ servers connected with an IBM High Performance Switch (HPS) running AIX and using the IBM Parallel Environment MPI.

ESSL
ESSL is a collection of subroutines providing a wide range of performance-tuned mathematical functions for many common scientific and engineering applications. The mathematical subroutines are divided into nine computational areas:
  • Linear Algebra Subprograms
  • Matrix Operations
  • Linear Algebraic Equations
  • Eigensystem Analysis
  • Fourier Transforms, Convolutions, Correlations and Related Computations
  • Sorting and Searching
  • Interpolation
  • Numerical Quadrature
  • Random Number Generation

ESSL provides two run-time libraries; both libraries support both 32-bit and 64-bit environment applications:
  • The ESSL Serial Library provides thread-safe versions of the ESSL subroutines for use on all processors. You may use this library to develop your own multithreaded applications.
  • The ESSL Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Library provides thread-safe versions of the ESSL subroutines for use on all SMP processors. In addition, some of these subroutines are also multithreaded, meaning, they support the shared memory parallel processing programming model. You do not have to change your existing application programs that call ESSL to take advantage of the increased performance of using the SMP processors; you can simply re-link your existing programs.

Both libraries are designed to provide high levels of performance for numerically intensive computing jobs and both provide mathematically equivalent results. The ESSL subroutines can be called from application programs written in Fortran, C, and C++. ESSL runs under the AIX and Linux operating systems.

Parallel ESSL
Parallel ESSL is a scalable mathematical subroutine library that supports parallel processing applications on clusters of processor nodes connected by either a Myrinet-2000 switch or an IBM High Performance Switch (HPS). Parallel ESSL supports the Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) programming model using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library.

Parallel ESSL provides subroutines in the following computational areas:
  • Level 2 Parallel Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (PBLAS)
  • Level 3 PBLAS
  • Linear Algebraic Equations
  • Eigensystem Analysis and Singular Value Analysis
  • Fourier Transforms
  • Random Number Generation

For communication, Parallel ESSL includes the Basic Linear Algebra Communications Subprograms (BLACS), which use MPI. For computations, Parallel ESSL uses the ESSL subroutines (ESSL is a pre-requisite).

The Parallel ESSL subroutines can be called from 32-bit and 64-bit application programs written in Fortran, C, and C++.

Parallel ESSL subroutines run under the AIX and Linux operating systems:
  • On AIX and Linux, the Parallel ESSL GM Libraries are provided for use with the MPICH-GM library and the Myrinet-2000 switch with Myrinet/PCI-X adapters. IP is not supported. Only single-threaded applications are supported.
  • On AIX only, the Parallel ESSL SMP Libraries are provided for use with the IBM Parallel Environment MPI library. You can run single or multithreaded US or IP applications on all types of nodes. However, you cannot simultaneously call Parallel ESSL from multiple threads. Use these Parallel ESSL libraries if you are using both PE MPI and LAPI. The SMP library is for use on the POWER™ and PowerPC® SMP processors.