How to ... Compile a Program

The main computer languages used at NERSC are Fortran 90, Standard C, and C++. Almost all parallel programming at NERSC uses MPI and/or OpenMP.

No changes to the default environment are needed in order to use compilers. Their behavior is similar to what you would expect on any UNIX machine. For example, this command line will use the C compiler to create an executable program from the source code file named hello.c.

% cc hello.c

By default, the executable is named a.out.

Each platform has its own specific compilers. See the web page specific to your machine of interest for more information.

Linking with software libraries is simple in the modules environment; in general, you may use predefined environment variables in the compile line (common libraries will be linked by default).