WebTrilinos

WebTrilinos Web-Based Interface to Trilinos

Help - FAQ

What is WebTrilinos?
What's significant about the name 'WebTrilinos'?
What platforms does WebTrilinos run on?
Is there support for MPI?
Which Trilinos packages are required to install and use WebTrilinos?
Which non-Trilinos packages are required to install and use WebTrilinos?
What about security?

What is WebTrilinos?

WebTrilinos is a web-based interface to Trilinos, or a portal to the Trilinos world. It is composed by three modules, contained in three separate directories:

MatrixPortal, which is the matrix-testing environment;
a C++ module, which allows the testing of C++ programs;
a python module, which allows the testing of PyTrilinos programs.

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What's significant about the name 'WebTrilinos'?

Simply that you can use most of Trilinos from the Web. Stated otherwise, WebTrilinos is a new skin of Trilinos. However, you won't find access to WebTrilinos modules from this web site: you (or your system administrator) have to install WebTrilinos on a web server. Top

What platforms does WebTrilinos run on?

WebTrilinos has been tested on a Linux webserver (Fedora Core), but it should run on all platforms with python, a web server (we use apache) and PHP installed, and where PyTrilinos runs. If you can install and use PyTrilinos, then you are mostly done; please check the PyTrilinos web page for more details on how to install PyTrilinos. WebTrilinos also uses few *nix commands like convert. Top

Is there support for MPI?

No, the current version does not support MPI. This is because of the different usage of each MPI product, which would make the installation procedure much more complicated. However, if you are really interested in using WebTrilinos with MPI on a given machine, it will not take too long to extend it. If so, please contact the developers. Top

Which Trilinos packages are required to install and use WebTrilinos?

WebTrilinos minimally requires the following Trilinos packages:

Teuchos
Epetra
EpetraExt
Galeri
AztecOO
Amesos
IFPACK
ML
PyTrilinos

Other packages can be used through the C++ interface. Recall that there is no support for MPI. Top

Which non-Trilinos packages are required to install and use WebTrilinos?

The following non-Trilinos packages are needed:

the XML parser EXPAT, which is typically already installed on most systems. This requires --enable-teuchos-expat. You also have to specify the location and name of the expat library in your LDFLAGS and LIBS. EXPAT is only used to load XML problems in the MatrixPortal module, so you might decide to skip it --- 99 % of WebTrilinos will run anyway;
a web server (for example, Apache);
support for PHP, version 5 or higher;
a Python plotting tool called PyChart;
the convert *nix tool;

Note that Trilinos requires BLAS and LAPACK, and the PyTrilinos package requires NumPy and SWIG. However packages can be configured with support for several third-party libraries, but none of them is mandatory to use WebTrilinos. Top

What about security?

The C++ and Python modules of WebTrilinos gives full access to WebTrilinos users, and as such they should be password protected. Only trusted users should be able to use the C++ and Python modules. This is easy to do with Apache: just add a .htaccess file. DO NOT LET ANONYMOUS USERS ACCESS YOUR C++ AND Python MODULES OF WebTRILINOS, THIS IS A SEVERE SECURITY RISK FOR YOUR SYSTEM!!!. The MatrixPortal module, instead, does not expose the system, and can be made accessible to anonymous users. Whether the resulting workload is acceptable or not for a given installation should be established by the user. Top