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Getting Started

Beginning to use Trilinos can be a daunting task, as it is a large and complex software suite. This page walks you through the various resources available to new users. First, you’ll want to acquaint yourself with Trilinos at a high level. Next, learn where particular functionality resides. Then, you’ll be ready to begin configuring and installing Trilinos on your own machine. Finally, dig in to the details of actually putting Trilinos to work on your problems.

Note that there may be overlap between some documents.

What is Trilinos All About?

Try this first:

  • About page – What’s Trilinos all about?
  • Trilinos Overview (.pdf) – A broad overview of Trilinos
  • Events – Links to Trilinos-focused event pages. Recent Trilinos User Group meeting pages contain links to recorded presentations covering introductory and advanced topics

Supplemental material:

What’s Available in Trilinos?

Try this first:

Supplemental material:

Configuring, Building, and Installing Trilinos

Trilinos CMake Reference (html, pdf) – Instructions for building Trilinos 10.0 and later.

TPL version compatibility

For information about building Trilinos 9.0 and earlier, look here.

Working With Trilinos

Try this first:

  • Trilinos Hands-on Tutorial – Introductory and example material used for numerous live hands-on tutorials
  • Trilinos 10.12 Tutorial (.pdf) – A tutorial for new Trilinos users including introductions to some important concepts and examples. Covers primarily the Epetra stack of packages. This tutorial was last updated for Trilinos release 10.12. See the Trilinos Hands-on Tutorial for more up-to-date information.
  • FIND_PACKAGE(Trilinos) Documentation – Instructions for building your Trilinos 10.0 and later compatible CMake-aware software project. The FIND_PACKAGE capability makes it easy to build against Trilinos, including linking against the correct list of libraries. In Trilinos 10.6 and later, a small functional example to be used as a template for applications wanting to use FIND_PACKAGE(Trilinos) can be found in the source code under demos/buildAgainstTrilinos.
  • Makefile.export Documentation – The Makefile.export system, avaialble in Trilinos 10.4 and later, provides an easy way to build against Trilinos for code that is compiled using simple Makefiles.
  • Didasko – An example package frequently referred to by the Trilinos Tutorial

Supplemental material:

  • Documentation page – A list of Trilinos publications and other documentation
  • View the publications and source documentation on the individual package sites for more detailed information (see the Packages page).