The ABINIT Users Mailing List ( CLOSED )

[Yann Pouillon <yann.pouillon@ehu.es>]

Hi,

BOTTIN Francois <francois.bottin@cea.fr> ha escrito:

> > i guess scalapack is not included with abinit..
> Not yet. I think, it's not envisaged (Yann is probably more up to date).

Exactly. Abinit embeds the minimum possible, focusing only on what is:

  * an essential requirement (e.g. BLAS, LAPACK);
  * not widely available (e.g. FoX, ETSF I/O);
  * difficult to have working with Abinit (e.g. Wannier90, which has
    to be patched before compiling it in order to be interoperable).

The tendency in future versions will be on the contrary to reduce the  
number of embedded external libraries, as more and more of them are  
distributed with the various available operating systems. This will  
make things much simpler for everybody, because you won't have to  
recompile these libraries each time you build Abinit, and we won't  
have to maintain them anymore.

If we start to embed every new library Abinit may depend on, we will  
end up distributing "the Abinit OS", ;-) which is definitely beyond  
the scope of the project. The whole point is to find a way that makes  
the user's life easier, while not making those of the developers and  
maintainers a hell. What I can assure you now is that having NetCDF  
inside Abinit has been causing a lot of problems for already 3 years.  
And it's not about to end!

This is also part of the user's job to complain to their system  
administrators about missing libraries and outdated development  
environments. We cannot substitute ourselves to the computer  
scientists forever. So, please do bother them until you get what you  
need. ;-)

In any case, this is always better to build Abinit against an external  
library which is complete and has been optimized for your platform  
than using the subsets provided with the source of Abinit.

Best regards,

Yann.

--
Yann Pouillon               European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF)
Tel: (+34) 943 01 83 94     Centro Joxe Mari Korta, Avenida de Tolosa, 72
Fax: (+34) 943 01 83 90     20018 Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa)
Web: http://www.etsf.es/    España