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2001 CERNLIB Release

Ian Mclaren , IT/API


Version 2001 of the CERN Program Library for the CERN supported platforms and compilers was released on Monday, 11 June 2001. To fix the bug in PAW for some uses of the "opera/add" function an update was made on Monday, 18 June 2001. The basic code was frozen on 7 May 2001.

Major changes

  • Lapack has been separated from mathlib and requires liblapack3.a and libblas.a, mainly to avoid name clashes with kernlib and naglib, but also to give users more flexibility in managing these libraries. For example, users only referencing Lapack should change from "cernlib mathlib" to "cernlib lapack".
  • Pawlib also references Lapack so users of pawlib applications may need to change their link sequence, the most likely being interactive geant321 and geant++ applications. However, the "cernlib" command has been changed to help with backwards compatibility.
  • Monte Carlo libraries:
    • There are new versions of the Monte Carlo libraries pdflib804, isajet751 and pythia6152. As usual the previous versions can be obtained from the obsolete/lib directory for the relevant platform. Note that the previous pdflib had no version number.
    • Pythia had dummy routines (pdfset, structm and structp) which prevent easy use of pdflib804 on most Unix systems. These have been removed and made available in the new library libpythiad.a for those users who cannot use the recommended link sequence `cernlib pythia6152 pdflib804`.
    • Jetset74 had dummy routines (pdfset and structm) which prevent easy use of pdflib804 on most Unix versions. These have been removed and made available in the new library libjetsetd.a for those users who cannot use the recommended link sequence `cernlib jetset74 pdflib804`.
    • Notes on Monte Carlo releases:
      • Some years ago, when the new version of Pythia was released, it was firmly pointed out by the Monte Carlo authors and physicists from Opal and Aleph that the old Cernlib policy on these libraries was inherently dangerous and that users should be made aware by the version number which version (and Physics) they were getting. This has been applied to Jetset, Pythia, Isajet, Photos and now pdflib, and the user friendly but dangerous links were broken.
      • So our policy is to find a compromise between the latest stable version from the authors and what is required by the CERN experiments. The previous versions are made available by keeping them in the "obsolete/lib" directory for the relevant platform.
      • In the case of pdflib, the author requested that pdflib804 should replace the very old pdflib which was created before the new policy was introduced. So, users are strongly recommended to change to pdflib804. If, for some reason, they can not do so, then version 7 can still be used from the old or obsolete directories.

For details:

For details of this release refer to the Cernlib Web page and the 2001 release notes. Some interesting links are:



For matters related to this article please contact the author.
Cnl.Editor@cern.ch


CERN-CNL-2001-002
Vol. XXXVI, issue no 2


Last Updated on Fri Aug 03 12:02:34 CEST 2001.
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