Supported compilers

C++11 support is required as of Elemental 0.82, and so reasonably up-to-date compilers are now necessary. More detailed information will hopefully follow soon, but the following compilers have been verified to compile the recent releases of Elemental:

• GCC >= 4.8

• Clang >= 3.6

• Intel >= 17 update 1 (due to known bugs in the Intel compilers)

Known toolchain issues

GCC on recent versions of OS X

As reported by Issue #181, GCC 5.x and 6.x appear to be improperly assuming 16-byte alignments on OS X when the -O3 optimizations are enabled. While simply using -O2 optimizations avoids the issue, Clang should perhaps be preferred on recent versions of OS X. OS X users are therefore recommended to install GCC 4.9.

MPICH 3.2 + Clang + OS X

As reported by Issue #200, there are known issues with compiling MPICH 3.2 with Clang that can cause failures in very simple MPI programs. The recommended solution is to take the following advice and to build MPICH from source using the most recent version from git.mpich.org/mpich.git.

Intel compilers

As discussed by Issue #177, relatively recent versions of the Intel C++ compilers do not properly parse Elemental’s source. The issue is supposedly addressed by version 17 update 1.

OpenMPI < 1.8.1

Due to a known bug in OpenMPI 1.6.5’s handling of complex data, Elemental requires that OpenMPI version 1.8.1 or later be used.