The PINEAPL Library is a collection of parallel routines written in Fortran 77 for the solution of numerical problems. The Library is targeted primarily at distributed memory machines. It enables users to take advantage of the increased processing power and memory capacity offered by multiple processors environments. This Parallel Library provides subroutines in areas covered by traditional numerical libraries, but emphasis is given to those areas which by nature of the end-user applications are computationally intensive. A list of areas covered are:

• Dense Linear Algebra (all types of matrices, eg. real, complex, symmetric, unsymmetric etc.)
  • Direct methods for solution of linear equations
  • Eigenvalue problems
  • Computing (estimating) condition numbers
  • Banded solvers
  • Tridiagonal solvers

• Sparse Linear Algebra (all types of matrices, eg. real, complex, symmetric, unsymmetric etc.)
  • Iterative methods for solution of linear equations
  • Preconditioners
  • Black Box routines

• Optimisation
  • Unconstrained problems
  • Constrained problems

• Discrete Fourier Transforms
  • One-dimensional FFT
  • Two-dimensional FFT
  • Three-dimensional FFT

• Partial Differential Equations (two-dimensional, three-dimensional)
  • Helmholtz equations
  • Fast Poisson solvers
  • Mesh partitioning
  • Multigrid

• Dynamic Load-balancing

• Support/Utility Facilities
  • Process Management routines (under PVM or MPI)
  • Input/Output routines (for distributed data)
  • Data distribution routines (dense and sparse matrices)
  • Basic sparse matrix operations (eg matrix-vector multiplication, transposed matrix multiplication, etc.)

The Library is available under MPI or PVM message-passing mechanisms. However, experience has shown that it scales well on shared-memory machines provided that efficient implementations of these message-passing mechanisms are available. All of the library software incorporated into the PINEAPL Library - irrespective of the particular numerical problems with which they deal - have to adhere to a specific set of design principles. These design principles have been established to ensure that the PINEAPL Library achieves a high standard of quality with respect to the criteria such as ease of use, portability, performance, flexibility and reliability.