Intel(R) - Computational and Systems Biology at MIT

Linking Your Applicationwith Intel® Math Kernel5LibraryThis chapter features linking of your applications with Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel®MKL) for the Linux* OS. The chapter compares static and dynamic linking models;describes the general link line syntax to be used for linking with Intel MKL libraries;provides comprehensive information in a tabular form on the libraries that should be linkedwith your application for your particular platform and function domain; gives linkingexamples. Building of custom shared objects is also discussed.Selecting Between Linkage ModelsYou can link your applications with Intel MKL libraries statically, using static libraryversions, or dynamically, using shared libraries.Static LinkingWith static linking, all links are resolved at link time. Therefore, the behavior of staticallybuilt executables is absolutely predictable, as they do not depend upon a particular versionof the libraries available on the system where the executables run. Such executables mustbehave exactly the same way as was observed during testing. The main disadvantage ofstatic linking is that upgrading statically linked applications to higher library versions istroublesome and time-consuming, as you have to relink the entire application. Besides,static linking produces large-size executables and uses memory inefficiently, since ifseveral executables are linked with the same library, each of them loads it into memoryindependently. However, this is hardly an issue for Intel MKL, used mainly for large-sizeproblems. — It matters only for executables having data size relatively small andcomparable with the size of the executable.5-1