Installation - BUFF-EM documentation

Installing buff-em

1. Install scuff-em

buff-em requires scuff-em, so if you don't have scuff-em installed you will need to do that first, following the instructions here.

2. External packages

buff-em doesn't require any external packages beyond those required for scuff-em.

Although not required to install, compile, or use buff-em, gmsh is an extremely valuable open-source meshing and visualization tool that is used throughout the buff-em documentation.

On Debian/Ubuntu Linux systems, you can install gmsh by doing a

% sudo apt-get install gmsh

Note: In some cases it seems the gmsh package conflicts with the libhdf5-serial-dev package. In this case, just remove gmsh from the above apt-get statement; you can install it by hand following the instructions on the GMSH website. (Note that gmsh, though very useful, is not necessary to compile or run buff-em.)

2. Cloning the GitHub repository and building the code

buff-em is hosted on GitHub. To fetch and install the latest version of the code, execute the following steps. (Replace the string /path/to/buff-em-installation-directory with your desired installation directory.)

% git clone https://homerreid@github.com/HomerReid/buff-em.git
% cd buff-em
% sh autogen.sh --prefix=/path/to/buff-em-installation-directory
% make install

If this succeeds, the executable versions of the application programs (such as buff-scatter, buff-neq, etc.) will be installed in the directory PREFIX/bin/ and the demonstration examples for the various application programs will be in PREFIX/share/buff-em/examples (where PREFIX is the directory you specified using the --prefix option above).

If you have trouble installing buff-em, please file an issue on the buff-em GitHub page.

Build options

You may specify options to the autogen.sh (or configure) command to guide the compilation process. For a full list of available options, type configure --help.

In some cases you may need to tweak certain environment variables to achieve maximal openmp performance when running (not building) buff-em. For example, on my workstation (which has 8 CPU cores), in order to get openmp codes to use all 8 cores I need to set the following environment variable:

% export GOMP_CPU_AFFINITY=0-7