Installing Octave with HDF5 on CentOS 6.8 with yum

If you are installing octave on CentOS6 and you wish to install HDF5, you may want to pull HDF5 from EPEL instead of RPMFORGE. You may have both repositories so you have to disable RPMFORGE first

# yum-config-manager --disable rpmforge

Install Octave with HDF5

# yum install octave hdf5 hdf5-devel

Configuration error when compiling octave with BLAS and LAPACK libraries

Do take a look at the Compiling Octave from Source on CentOS 5. However you make face an error such as
" configure: error: You are required to have BLAS and LAPACK libraries ".

This is due to the missing link. For more information on this error, you may want to take some hints from 
Cannot find -llapack when doing /usr/bin/ld on CentOS 5

In other words, just go to /usr/lib64 and do a softlink for the lapack library

ln -s /usr/lib64/liblapack.so.3 /usr/lib64/liblapack.so

 

Parallel Computing and Packages of Octave

Here is some interesting information on Parallel Computation for Octave

1. openmpi_ext
   MPI functions for parallel computing using simple MPI Derived Datatypes. It requires Octave
   (>= 3.2.4)
2. parallel
   Parallel execution package for cluster computers. For parallel execution on a single machine see e.g. function parcellfun (author: Jaroslav Hajek) in package general. It requires Octave (>= 3.0.0)
3. multicore
   An Octave-forge package providing functions for parallel processing on multiple cores. It requires (>= 2.9.12)

For more information on Octave Packages, see Octave Package