Configuring AMUSE

Introduction

In AMUSE a configuration script is used to for two purposes; to run on different operating systems and to set compile time options. The AMUSE framework has been built on Linux, AIX and OS X systems, it also runs on Windows. AMUSE can be configured to run with or without MPI, GPU (CUDA) and openmp. In this document we will provide a short overview of the configuration options and their effects.

Basic

The basic configuration of AMUSE uses MPI as the communication channel, does not build any GPU enabled codes (or GPU enabled versions) and uses openmp if available. The configuration script can be run as:

> ./configure

To get a list of options and important environment variables run `configure` with the help flag:

> ./configure --help

A very important variable for the configuration script is the location of the python executable. The python executable is searched for in the PATH and you can override it by setting the `PYTHON` environment variable:

> ./configure PYTHON=/path/to/libraries/python

The configuration script will look for dependent libraries in default locations of the system and, if defined, also in directories under the `PREFIX` environment variable. If you installed the prerequisites with the AMUSE installation scripts (see Installation of the prerequisite software), the configuration script should find all the packages installed. For most libraries the `PREFIX/lib` or `PREFIX/lib64` is searched before the system path. You can override the `PREFIX` environment variable:

> ./configure PREFIX=/path/to/libraries/root

GPU

Currently all codes in AMUSE capable of using the GPU are based on CUDA. To run these codes you will need CUDA libraries and drivers. Once these have been installed you can run configure like so:

> ./configure --enable-cuda

The configuration script will look for the `nvcc` compiler and the cuda libraries, in well known paths. Unfortunately it often will not find the cuda tools and you have to specify the some environment variables or configuration options.

If the configuration script cannot find the nvcc compiler (or if it finds the wrong one) you can specify the nvcc compiler with the `NVCC` environment variable:

> ./configure --enable-cuda NVCC=/path/to/nvcc

The configure script also searches for the nvcc compiler in the `$CUDA_TK/bin` directory:

> ./configure --enable-cuda CUDA_TK=/opt/nvidia

The configure script looks for cuda and cudart libraries in `$NVCC/../lib` or `$NVCC/../lib64`, if your libraries cannot be found there you can override the library path with:

> ./configure --enable-cuda --with-cuda-libdir=/path/to/cuda/lib

Using `--with-cuda-libdir` will always override the local search paths and should also work if you have an old version of cuda in `/usr/lib`.

Finally, if all else fails, you can edit the `config.mk` file after configure has finished. The important variables in the file are:

  • CUDA_ENABLED, valid values are “yes” or “no”.

  • NVCC, absolute path to the nvcc executable.

  • CUDA_TK, directory of the cuda toolkit installation

  • CUDA_LIBS, library flags the add in the linking stage (-L/path -lcuda -lcudart)

Please remember that the `config.mk` file is overwritten every time configure is run.

Sapporo library version

The Sapporo library will be build when CUDA is enabled. The Sapporo library implements the GRAPE6 API on GPU hardware. AMUSE is shipped with two versions of the Sapporo library:

  • An older version `sapporo_light` that runs on most CUDA devices but is not maintained any longer

  • The latests version `sapporo` that runs on modern GPU hardware. This version should also run on OpenCL devices but this is still a work in progress.

By default AMUSE will use the older `sapporo_light` version, to enable the latests version do:

> ./configure –enable-cuda –enable-sapporo2