Installing ITensor with OpenMP multithreading support

ITensor provides some native OpenMP multithreading. Currently, block sparse tensor contractions support optional multithreading, so any ITensor code using QN conservation and where the computation time is dominated by tensor contractions may benefit.

Steps to Compile ITensor with OpenMP multithreading support

Step 0 of compiling ITensor with OpenMP multithreading support is to have the OpenMP library available on your system. It is likely already available, since it is included with most modern compilers. If not, you will have to look up instructions on how to install it depending on the compiler and system you are using.

Step 1 is to modify your options.mk file, which is used to configure the ITensor compilation process. In options.mk, find the line

#ITENSOR_USE_OMP=1

then uncomment this line (remove the "#" character).

Step 2 is to compile, or recompile ITensor fully, so that OpenMP support is built throughout the library:

make clean
make

If the compilation succeeds, you will have OpenMP multithreading support within ITensor.

Step 3 is to set the number of threads you want. Before running your executable, you can set the number of threads with the following command line command:

export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8

or by calling your executable as follows:

OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 ./myappname

We also recommend turning off BLAS/LAPACK multithreading, since it may compete with ITensor's native multithreading.

To turn off BLAS multithreading if you are compiling ITensor with Intel MKL you can set the environment variable:

export MKL_NUM_THREADS=1

or directly link to MKL's sequential library (see the BLAS/LAPACK section of options.mk.sample for an example of how to do that).

To turn off BLAS multithreading if you are compiling ITensor with OpenBLAS, you can set the following environment variable:

export OPENBLAS_NUM_THREADS=1