The PLE (Parallel Location and Exchange) library is designed to simplify coupling of distributed parallel computational codes. It is maintained a a part of code_caturne CFD tool, EDF's general purpose Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, but it may also be used with other tools, and is distributed under a more permissive licence (LGPL instead of GPL).

PLE provides support for 2 categories of tasks: synchronizing parallel codes at predifined points, and enabling parallel mapping of points to meshes, and transfer of variables using this mapping.

Its target use is coupling of parallel tools based using MPI, though it could be adapted to other runtimes.

The PLE library is distrubuted under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. See the COPYING file for details.

The installation system is based on the GNU autotools.

To create a standalone installation of PLE, it is recommended to create a specific build directory, and run PLE's configure script from there:

mkdir ple_build
cd ple_build
<path_to_ple_sources>/configure
make
make install

The "configure" script takes several options, so running: <path_to_ple_sources>/configure --help first is recommended to list the available options.