Installing and Linking MKL with Intel Fortran and LS-DYNA

[Bibek]

My research lab currently has license for Intel Fortran 10.1 to link with LS-DYNA for used defined feature development, but unfortunately not equipped with MKL library (I checked the directories). To perform some complicated rigorous numerical computations, I am willing to take the advantage of Intel MKL routines. To my understanding, MKL is free but I don’t see any repository hosting old MKL libraries that is compatible with older Intel Fortran compliers. Could you please let me know how I could download old MKL libraries and configure it with Intel Fortran, Visual Studio 2008 and LS-DYNA to use the routines. If newer version of MKL routines are compatible with Intel Fortran 10.1, still I would like to know if how could I link them with aforementioned software? If it’s not possible at all, how can I use freely available LAPACK with above software? Any documentation and/ or tutorial to install, link, and configure the software would be useful.

Thanks,

Bibek

[Gennady_F_Intel]

Here is the link https://software.intel.com/en-us/performance-libraries where you can take the latest version of MKL. We support only current ( v.2019) and two latest versions. I am not sure which version of MKL did you used in the past, but MKL backward compatible. You may take the newest version and try to play. 

[Gennady_F_Intel]

and you may also take the original netlib lapack, build it and use it as usual.  in that case, expect to see some perf regressions.

[Bibek]

This is my first time using Intel MKL. Fortunately, I got Intel MKL 10.0 which was bought together with Intel Fortran 10.1 years ago. I was able to install and use it. There are tutorials and posts available how to link MKL with Intel Fortran on Microsoft Visual Studio or just during compiling by adding \Qmkl command. I am not sure how can I configure LS-DYNA to recognize and compile Intel MKL subroutines.

[Gennady_F_Intel]

I think this topic is application-specific and it's beyond this forum discussion.  From a performance point of view - ten years old version of mkl doesn't contain a lot of optimizations to the existing latest hardware, as a result, expect to see a significant performance drop against the latest versions.

[Bibek]

LS-DYNA supplied makefile (see the attached image) and their necessary libraries (all the libraries listed on makefile are supplied by LS-DYNA in .lib format in the same directory as source code and makefile), and upon contacting their support, I was asked to link Intel MKL libraries by including them in the makefile using Intel MKL link-line advisor. Intel MKL documentation at this point is tad bit technical for me as a new user, but I will give it a shot next week. One other option came to my mind about linking is, what if I copy .lib files from Intel MKL installation directory and paste in the same directory and include it in the makefile like LS-DYNA did. Is that approach going to work?

Meanwhile I was trying to use Intel Parallel Studio XE 2019.5 on my personal laptop which runs macOS 10.15. I was able to run regular fortran code (I didn't have to use following command on terminal in this case to set the environment variables).

source \opt\intel\bin\compilervars.sh

When I tried using MKL example, I got some error. I also tried set environment variables using equivalent command for mkl to set environment variables but resulted in nothing. I am not sure if used right command to invoke the compiler for mkl examples (ifort mkl_example.f) or it's just because Intel Parallel Studio XE 2019.5 isn't still supported on macOS 10.15 Catalina. I am surprised Intel Fortran compiler worked regardless and was trying to make MKL working on macOS 10.15.

[Alumoottil__Thomas]

Any updates on this? I am trying to link the mkl libraries to Dyna as well and am not able to do it!