[petsc-dev] Quad precision and external libraries

[Barry Smith]

  package.py has

    self.double           = 0   # 1 means requires double precision

but this should be reworked to allow indicating if a package supports single, double, and __float128 then each package/xxx.py should list what it supports.

   Barry



> On Aug 22, 2016, at 12:44 PM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It seems to be possible to configure and build PETSc with
> quad/__float128 precision only to find that your code won't run
> because the external package you were planning on using doesn't
> support quad precision (as it usually won't).
> 
> It seems that configure will not prevent you from building with
> external packages which don't support quad precision; instead, the
> make process will simply skip some things, as controlled by
> "#requiresprecision double" in local makefiles.  This means that you
> will eventually notice the problem when you get a link error during
> "make test", like
> 
> Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
>  "_MatSolverPackageRegister_SuiteSparse", referenced from:
>      import-atom in libpetsc.dylib
> 
> It seems like this behavior includes a lot of the popular external
> packages (including several sparse direct solvers, which is how this
> was noticed), based on grepping the src/ tree for "requiresprecision".
> 
> There is also at least one package (SuperLU) that is missing this
> flag. For instance, I can configure, build, and test with no visible
> problems with these configure options with master (on my OS X laptop
> with gcc from macports):
> --with-precision=__float128 --download-superlu --with-cc=gcc
> --with-cxx=g++ --with-fc=gfortran --download-mpich
> --download-f2cblaslapack
> 
> I then only see failure when I try to use the external package. e.g.
> for KSP ex1:
> 
> $ ./ex1 -pc_type lu -pc_factor_mat_solver_package superlu -ksp_converged_reason
> Linear solve did not converge due to DIVERGED_PCSETUP_FAILED iterations 0
>               PCSETUP_FAILED due to FACTOR_NUMERIC_ZEROPIVOT
> ...
> 
> So, if I haven't made any false assumptions yet,
> 1. it'd be easy to add any missing "#requiresprecision double" lines
> to more makefiles (though I'm not sure what to do re single precision,
> for packages like SuperLU that support single and double).
> 2.  It also might be worth going further to modify the BuildSystem to
> allow packages to specify precision-dependency there. (And if that's
> the way to go, note that in /lib/petsc/conf/rules there are also
> procedures for real/complex and C/C++ conditional compilation, which
> would likely affect external packages in the same way).