3

We have an HPC environment with multiple versions of most packages, causing us to have designed a home-rolled way to install packages in unique locations and use environment modules for programmers/researchers to be able to identify which library versions they are using when they build a program, run a program, or both. Is there a relatively painless way to be able to perform builds in this environment. In my case, we're using OpenBLAS, ARPACK, LAPACK and SuperLU when building armadillo. In my case, I'm shooting for armadillo-0.3.7. It would be real nice if the use of switches as was done in the ./configure and make days would work. But all I've found so far is CMake builds, and it appears to be pretty much non-trivial to do a build.

Oh yeah. And, by the way, there's a need for the output Armadillo library to be static.

Thanks in advance for your help. The initial question may be a little vague, but I can get as specific as you like. I just didn't want to write a novel for the initial question on this issue.

Nikolai Shevchenko
  • 7,083
  • 8
  • 33
  • 42
Snidley
  • 31
  • 1

2 Answers2

0

Tools exist nowadays to handle the complexity of the build of these scientific software. I would suggest you look at either Spack or EasyBuild. Such tool will help you to save a lot of time by automatically building all the required dependencies and also generating the modulefiles for your users to use the software built.

Xavier Delaruelle
  • 771
  • 7
  • 21
  • Thank you. I will look into them. We happen to be using an older OS version than is recommended - CentOS 6.x. But I'll take it into consideration. – Snidley Dec 27 '19 at 20:16
0

The CMakeList.txt file and other CMake-related files can be modified to meet your needs. The flags are defined on line 48+, for instance set(ARMA_USE_LAPACK false) The variables related to the LAPACK library are then defined in the include(ARMA_FindLAPACK) on line 250. The flag in toggled on on line 347 if lapack is found.

The customized path where LAPACK is located can be specified in the file cmake_aux/ARMA_FindLAPACK.cmake. If your customized path is stored as an environment variable as export PATHLAPACKLIB=/usr/lib/openblas-base, you can use it in the ARMA_FindLAPACK.cmake file by modifying line 11 ( see How to retrieve a user environment variable in CMake (Windows) and FIND_LIBRARY()):

message("Searching Lapack in $ENV{PATHLAPACKLIB}")
FIND_LIBRARY(LAPACK_LIBRARY
   NAMES ${LAPACK_NAMES}
   HINTS $ENV{PATHLAPACKLIB}
   NO_DEFAULT_PATH
)

It is not a beautiful modification of the CMakefile, because it makes it not portable as its outcome depends on an environment variable. But, it you intend to to build and install Armadillo once for all, it works. Remember to delete the CMakeCache.txt file every time you modify a CMakeFile.txt, otherwise it keeps some trace of previous runs of cmake . and it looks as though the modification is consequenceless.

To make the library static, add the keyword static to the command add_library() on line 514 of CMakeFile.txt, as shown in CMake - Creating a static library :

add_library( armadillo  STATIC ...)

Running cmake . and then make creates a small armadillo.a file, since most of the source consists in cpp headers. Finally, the exemple1 is compiled as :

g++ -O2 -std=c++11 example1.cpp -o example1 -larmadillo -L/home/...../softs/armadillo-9.800.3/armadillo-9.800.3 -I/home/...../softs/armadillo-9.800.3/armadillo-9.800.3/include -lopenblas
francis
  • 9,525
  • 2
  • 25
  • 41