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Building From Scratch

When spack fails, there aren't many options but to build the code from scratch. This is typically an arduous, poorly documented, and often times frustrating process. Here will provide some simple examples of how to build various HPC programs from scratch.

Setup​

mkdir ${GRC_TUTORIAL}/2.2.1.scratch
cd ${GRC_TUTORIAL}/2.2.1.scratch
mkdir src
mkdir install
  • src: will contain the source code of the programs we're building
  • install: will contain the compiled code of the programs

Overview of Build Systems​

There are many build systems you may encounter when building from source

  1. Autotools
  2. Make
  3. CMake
  4. Ninja
  5. Meson

Example: Zlib​

Zlib is foundational to nearly every package in HPC. Zlib is a compression library. Zlib uses Autotools as its build system.

Download + Decompress​

First we will download and decompress the zlib package.

wget https://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.3.tar.gz
tar -xzf zlib-1.3.tar.gz

Configure​

Next we will configure Zlib to the particular machine.

cd zlib-1.2.13
./configure --prefix=${GRC_TUTORIAL}/2.2.1.scratch/install

The output of ./configure is a Makefile.

--prefix tells the Autotools configurator where to install compiled code after building. If left unset, this will default to /usr.

To see a full list of configure options, do

./configure -h

Make​

After running configure, we will use the machine-specific Makefile to actually compile the code. This is done as follows:

make -j8

-j indicates the amount of parallelism to use when building the progam. In our case we use 8 threads. Don't use more threads than you have cores on your machine.

Install​

Lastly, we install using:

make install

This will populate the install directory with the compiled data.