6. Getting Started

TAO can be used on a personal computer with a single processor or within a parallel environment. Its basic usage involves only a few commands, but fully understanding its usage requires time. Application programmers can easily begin to use TAO by working with some examples provides in the package and then gradually learn more details according to their needs. The current version of TAO and the most recent help concerning the installation and usage of TAO can be found at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/tao/.

The current version (1.10.1) of TAO requires an ANSI C++ compiler, an implementation of MPI, Version 3.1 of PETSc compiled with the C++ compiler, (PETSc must be configured with the --with-clanguage=C++ option) and at least 15 MB of free disk space. During the setup process, the user will have to set an environmental variable, TAO_DIR, indicating the full path of the TAO home directory. This variable will be used in this manual to refer to the location of files, and by computers that will compile TAO source code.