Thursday, November 24, 2011

OpenFOAM and FEniCS Fedora Install Notes

Notes on installing OpenFOAM and FEniCS from source on Fedora 14.

Both projects implement ideas similar to A Livermore Physics Applications Language (NALPAL, why ALPAL): take high-level descriptions of partial differential equations and automatically generate code to solve them with numerical approximations based on finite-volume (OpenFOAM) or finite-element (FEniCS) methods.

Steps for OpenFOAM

  1. Install Fedora packages for paraview, cmake, flex, qt, zlib.
    [root@deeds foo]$ yum -y install paraview cmake flex qt-devel libXt-devel zlib-devel zlib-static scotch scotch-devel openmpi openmpi-devel
    You probably already have gnuplot and readline installed, if not, install those too.
  2. Unpack the OpenFOAM tarball:
    [jstults@deeds OpenFOAM]$ tar -zxvf OpenFOAM-2.0.1.gtgz
  3. Add the environment variable definitions to the bashrc file
    source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.0.1/etc/bashrc
    [jstults@deeds OpenFOAM]$ source ~/.bashrc
  4. Run the OpenFOAM-X.y.z/bin/foamSystemCheck script, you should get something that says, "System check: PASS", "Continue OpenFOAM installation."
  5. Go to the top-level directory, since you defined the proper environment variables that is something like
    [jstults@deeds OpenFOAM]$ cd $WM_PROJECT_DIR
  6. Make it
    [jstults@deeds OpenFOAM-X.y.z]$ ./Allwmake
  7. Various Consequences ensue...

Steps for FEniCS

Required components: Python packages FFC, FIAT, Instant, Viper and UFL, and Python/C++ packages Dolfin and UFC

  1. Install things packaged for Fedora
    [root@deeds FEniCS]$ yum -y install python-ferari python-instant python-fiat
  2. Download the other components from launchpad, and install using
    [jstults@deeds FEniCS]$ python setup.py install --prefix=~/FEniCS
    for the Python packages, and
    [jstults@deeds FEniCS]$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/FEniCS ./src
    [jstults@deeds FEniCS]$ make
    [jstults@deeds FEniCS]$ make install
    for the C++/Python packages (DOLFIN and UFC).

OR, do it automatically if you have root and internet access (I still haven't got this to work: a bit of buffoonery on my part, problems finding boost libraries).

  1. Download Dorsal
  2. Run the script
    [jstults@deeds FEniCS]$ ./dorsal.sh
  3. Execute the yum command in the output from the script in another terminal.
    [root@deeds FEniCS]$ yum install -y redhat-lsb bzr bzrtools subversion \ libxml2-devel gcc gcc-c++ openmpi-devel openmpi numpy swig wget \ boost-devel vtk-python atlas-devel suitesparse-devel blas-devel \ lapack-devel cln-devel ginac-devel python-devel cmake \ ScientificPython mpfr-devel armadillo-devel gmp-devel CGAL-devel \ cppunit-devel flex bison valgrind-devel
    I also installed the boost-openmpi-devel and boost-mpich2-devel packages as well. MPI on Fedora is kind of a mess. I added these two lines to my bashrc:
    module unload mpich2-i386
    module load openmpi-i386
  4. When the packages are installed, go back to the terminal running dorsal.sh and hit ENTER.

I ended up downloading the development version of dorsal to get the latest third-party software built, because it's so easy:
[jstults@deeds dorsal]$ bzr branch lp:dorsal
Pretty darn slick, Yea for distributed version control systems! Boo for dependency hell!

FEniCS is currently under heavy development towards a 1.0 release, so I expect to be able to build it on Fedora 14 Real Soon Now ; - )

Update: Johannes and friends got me straightened out.

3 comments:

  1. Upgraded to Fedora 16. Using the Fedora 15 platform configuration seems to have worked:

    ./dorsal.sh FEniCS/platforms/supported/fedora15.platform

    DOLFIN has now been installed in

    /home/jstults/Work/FEniCS

    and the demo programs have been installed in

    /home/jstults/Work/FEniCS/share/dolfin/demo

    Before rushing off to try the demos, don't forget to update your
    environment variables. This can be done easily using the helper file
    'dolfin.conf' which sets the appropriate variables (for users of the
    Bash shell).

    To update your environment variables, run the following command:

    source /home/jstults/Work/FEniCS/share/dolfin/dolfin.conf

    For future reference, we recommend that you add this command to your
    configuration (.bashrc, .profile or similar).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I spoke too soon: OSError: The Boost math library was not found.

    yum info boost-math gives:
    Description :
    : This package is a stub that used to contain run-time component of
    : boost math library. Now that boost math library is header-only,
    : this package is empty. It's kept around only so that during
    : yum-assisted update, old libraries from boost-math package aren't
    : left around.

    So, I don't think FEniCS will be working on Fedora any time soon.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That error was from trying to run 'python demo_navier-stokes.py'

    ReplyDelete