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Build the code from source

Last edited by Romain Boman

The source code is published here as free and open-source under the same license as Gmsh (GPL2) since it is heavily based on this library.

Windows

Building the binaries from source is not straightforward on Windows because several dependencies are required and they should be first installed on the system. We do not provide the user with detailled information about how to install these dependencies but rather a few comments on each one:

  • Gmsh: this library provides the pre- and post-processing functions. It also gives us access to the values of Jacobians, shape functions, Gauss quadrature data, etc. Gmsh-SDK should be uncompressed in a dedicated folder; then the INCLUDE, LIB, PYTHONPATH and PATH environment varibales should be set to path2gmsh\include, path2gmsh\lib, path2gmsh\bin, path2gmsh\bin respectively.
  • Eigen: this library is used for the linear algebra in C++. Installation consists in extracting the source code of Eigen into a dedicated folder, then adding this folder to the INCLUDE environment variable.
  • Python with the following packages installed from PyPI with pip install:
  • CMake: installed from the official installer and added to the PATH.
  • SWIG: the binaries are uncompressed to a specific folder which should be added to the PATH.
  • Intel OneAPI (not mandatory): this high-performance library adds the Pardiso Solver for solving the linear system of equations in parallel (shared-memory parllelism). This is one of the fastest direct solver available. See envs/win-msvc.cmd or envs/win-mingw64.cmd for an example of how to set the Math Kernel Library environment before the build.

The build procedure also requires a suitable C++ compiler: 2 compilers have been successfully tested on Windows:

Windows + Visual Studio

git clone git@gitlab.uliege.be:rboman/fossils.git
cd fossils
envs\win-msvc.cmd
cd cxxfem
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config Release
cd ..\..
fossils.py

The critical part is the cmake .. command. Check the output if it fails and fix your environment is something is not found (add folders to include files, libaries or executables to INCLUDE, LIB and PATH respectively), then retry until everything is found.

It is possible to build the code without the massive "Intel OneAPI" libraries with the following command:

cmake -DFEM_USE_MKL=OFF ..

Python modules are only required at runtime. Use pip install to install the missing dependencies if something is not found.

Windows + MinGW

The build procedure is similar to the one used with Visual Studio. The same libraries can be used with both compilers.

git clone git@gitlab.uliege.be:rboman/fossils.git
cd fossils
envs\win-mingw64.cmd
cd cxxfem
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ..
cmake --build . -- -j 4
cd ..\..
fossils.py

Linux

The build has been successfully tested on Ubuntu 20.04LTS and should be rather easy to perform on any other Linux distribution.

The Dockerfile used for the GitLab CI of this repository shows how to install the various dependencies.

Then, the build commands are similar to the ones used on Windows:

git clone git@gitlab.uliege.be:rboman/fossils.git
cd fossils
cd cxxfem
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j 4
cd ../..
./fossils.py