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This page contains instructions for installing or loading the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) and FFTW packages in several common unix environments. The GSL is required by all of the PSCF programs, while FFTW is required only by pscf_rpc.
Instructions for installing the doxygen documentation generator utility are also given below. Installing doxygen is not necessary to compile any of the PSCF programs, but is required to allow a user generate a local copy of this web manual.
Ubuntu and other Debian-based linux systems
The GSL and FFTW packages may be installed on Ubuntu or other Debian based linux distribution later on version 16.0 or later using the commands:
To install doxygen, use the command
On older Debian-based systems, or as a lower level alternative, one may use the "apt-get" command rather than "apt" with the same arguments.
Mac OS X
We recommend using a package manager to install GSL and FFTW on Mac OS X. If you are not already using a package manager for managing unix programs on Max OS X, we recommend that you install the Homebrew package manager, following instructions given on the Homebrew web site. Possible alternatives include the older MacPorts or Fink package managers, or compiling the required packages directly from source files obtained from package home pages.
Using Homebrew, you may install the GSL and FFTW packages with the commands
To also install doxygen, issue the command
Mac users should be aware that Homebrew installs files in different locations on newer Macs that use Apple silicon (e.g., an M1 or M2 chip) than the file locations used by Homebrew on older Macs that use an Intel CPU.
On Macs with an Intel CPU, Homebrew installed links to required header and library files in subdirectories of the /usr/local directory. Because /usr/local is one of the standard directories in which a unix shell normally looks for such files, PSCF can be installed on such machines using a default configuration for the makefile system that is the same as the default used on linux machines.
On Macs with Apple silicon, Homebrew instead installs all files in /opt/homebrew. This requires users to add paths to this directory and/or some of its subdirectories to the search paths used by the compiler to find header and library files. A compiler configuration file that modifies these search paths is provided as part of PSCF, as discussed here.
Linux software modules
At the University of Minnesota, PSCF is often run on a cluster provided by the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute (MSI). The computer clusters at MSI, and at many similar multi-user facilities, use the linux "module" command to allow users to load particular software packages, or particular choices of compiler. The module command is the user interface to the "Modules" package, which is a system for automating changes in a users unix shell environment that are required in order to use particular software packages.
On a multi-user system that uses linux modules, the command
should give a listing of all software modules available for use on a particular system. The syntax for the command to load a particular module is
where module-name represents the name of a particular software module, as listed by the "module avail" command.
On the computer cluster at MSI, we currently normally set up the compilation environment by invoking
before compiling PSCF. We use a version of fftw that was compiled with GCC version 7.2.0, rather than the most recent version, because the current version of CUDA (v10.0) isn't compatible with GCC versions with primary version numbers greater than 7.
These module load commands can be either be entered manually from the command line by the user after logging in, or they can be configured to be entered automatically on login by adding them to the users .profile or .bash_profile script.
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