[NLPL Task Force (A)] compiling against Boost and ICU

[Stephan Oepen]

colleagues, a happy new year!

i am trying to build some software that requires Boost and ICU, and i
believe i have a preference for the GNU tool chain.

i am running into the following problem:

[oe at login-0-0 repp]$ module purge; module load boost/1.60.0; module list
Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) gcc/5.1.0           3) icu/49.1.2
  2) openmpi.gnu/1.8.8   4) boost/1.60.0
[oe at login-0-0 repp]$ type -all icu-config
icu-config is /cluster/software/VERSIONS/icu-49.1.2/bin/icu-config
[oe at login-0-0 repp]$ icu-config --cpp-flags
### icu-config: Can't find /usr/local/lib/libicuuc.so - ICU prefix is wrong.
###      Try the --prefix= option
###      or --detect-prefix
###      (If you want to disable this check, use  the --noverify option)
### icu-config: Exitting.

this feels almost as if there might be something missing in the
icu/49.1.2 module definition, or maybe in the ICU installation itself?
 any chance you can do something about that?

—more generally, i see that newer versions of Boost are configured for
the intel tool chain, which makes me wonder whether there is a
system-wide preference or recommendation?  i could imagine that in
some cases at least i can obtain more efficient code (for a specific
architecture) using the intel compilers, but in my limited experience
at least i have repeatedly run into missing support in third-party
autoconf or cmake configurations, presumably because the far more
widely used compilers are from the GNU tool chain.

as a separate consideration, could one use MKL with the GNU compilers?

with thanks in advance, oe