Installation

Build prerequisites

  • Python-3.7 (or later)

  • CMake-3.14 (or later)

  • GNU-5.4 or Intel-17 (or later) compilers (C++14 standard)

Hint

We have collected the recommended modules for the different Norwegian HPC systems under tools/<machine>.env. These files can be sourced in order to get a working environment on the respective machines, and may also serve as a guide for other HPC systems.

C++ dependencies

The MRChem program depends on the following C++ libraries:

All these dependencies will be downloaded automatically at configure time by CMake, but can also be linked manually by setting the variables:

MRCPP_DIR=<path_to_mrcpp>/share/cmake/MRCPP
XCFun_DIR=<path_to_xcfun>/share/cmake/XCFun
Eigen3_DIR=<path_to_eigen3>/share/eigen3/cmake
nlohmann_json_DIR=<path_to_nlohmann_json>

Python dependencies

Users only need a Python3 interpreter, which is used for configuration (setup script) as well as launching the program (mrchem script).

Developers will need some extra Python packages to update the input parser and build the documentation locally with Sphinx.

We strongly suggest not to install these Python dependencies globally, but rather to use a local virtual environment. We provide a Pipfile for specifying the Python dependencies. We recommend using Pipenv, since it manages virtual environment and package installation seamlessly. After installing it with your package manager, run:

$ pipenv install --dev

to create a virtual environment with all developer packages installed.

The environment can be activated with:

$ pipenv shell

Alternatively, any Python command can be run within the virtual environment by doing:

$ pipenv run python -c "print('Hello, world')"

Obtaining and building the code

The latest development version of MRChem can be found on the master branch on GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/MRChemSoft/mrchem.git

The released versions can be found from Git tags vX.Y.Z under the release/X.Y branches in the same repository, or a zip file can be downloaded from Zenodo.

By default, all dependencies will be fetched at configure time if they are not already available.

Configure

The setup script will create a directory called <build-dir> and run CMake. There are several options available for the setup, the most important being:

--cxx=<CXX>

C++ compiler [default: g++]

--omp

Enable OpenMP parallelization [default: False]

--mpi

Enable MPI parallelization [default: False]

--type=<TYPE>

Set the CMake build type (debug, release, relwithdebinfo, minsizerel) [default: release]

--prefix=<PATH>

Set the install path for make install [default: ‘/usr/local’]

--cmake-options=<STRING>

Define options to CMake [default: ‘’]

-h --help

List all options

The code can be built with four levels of parallelization:

  • no parallelization

  • only shared memory (OpenMP)

  • only distributed memory (MPI)

  • hybrid OpenMP + MPI

Note

In practice we recommend the shared memory version for running on your personal laptop/workstation, and the hybrid version for running on a HPC cluster. The serial and pure MPI versions are only useful for debugging.

The default build is without parallelization and using GNU compilers:

$ ./setup --prefix=<install-dir> <build-dir>

To use Intel compilers you need to specify the --cxx option:

$ ./setup --prefix=<install-dir> --cxx=icpc <build-dir>

To build the code with shared memory (OpenMP) parallelization, add the --omp option:

$ ./setup --prefix=<install-dir> --omp <build-dir>

To build the code with distributed memory (MPI) parallelization, add the --mpi option and change to the respective MPI compilers (--cxx=mpicxx for GNU and --cxx=mpiicpc for Intel):

$ ./setup --prefix=<install-dir> --omp --mpi --cxx=mpicxx <build-dir>

When dependencies are fetched at configuration time, they will be downloaded into <build-dir>/_deps. For the example of MRCPP, sources are saved into the folders <build-dir>/_deps/mrcpp_sources-src and built into <build-dir>/_deps/mrcpp_sources-build.

Note

If you compile the MRCPP library manually as a separate project, the level of parallelization must be the same for MRCPP and MRChem. Similar options apply for the MRCPP setup, see mrcpp.readthedocs.io.

Build

If the CMake configuration is successful, the code is compiled with:

$ cd <build-dir>
$ make

Test

A test suite is provided to make sure that everything compiled properly. To run a collection of small unit tests:

$ cd <build-dir>
$ ctest -L unit

To run a couple of more involved integration tests:

$ cd <build-dir>
$ ctest -L integration

Install

After the build has been verified with the test suite, it can be installed with the following command:

$ cd <build-dir>
$ make install

This will install two executables under the <install-path>:

<install-path>/bin/mrchem       # Python input parser and launcher
<install-path>/bin/mrchem.x     # MRChem executable

Please refer to the User’s Manual for instructions for how to run the program.

Hint

We have collected scripts for configure and build of the hybrid OpenMP + MPI version on the different Norwegian HPC systems under tools/<machine>.sh. These scripts will build the current version under build-${version}, run the unit tests and install under install-${version}, e.g. to build version v1.0.0 on Fram:

$ cd mrchem
$ git checkout v1.0.0
$ tools/fram.sh

The configure step requires internet access, so the scripts must be run on the login nodes, and it will run on a single core, so it might take some minutes to complete. The scripts will not install the Python dependencies, so this must be done manually in order to run the code.