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Install

blip has been tested only on mac and linux, some parts *should* work on windows, but others will probably need some porting.

To use blip you need a few things. You can install everything in the way you prefer, in general you might disable some parts of blip that you are not interested in by using the correct flags. The easiest way is to add the flags to the DFLAGS environment variable (or to your compiler configuration file). For example to set version=noHwloc with a bash shell you would do 

export DFLAGS="$DFLAGS -version=noHwloc"

with the dmd compiler and 

export DFLAGS="$DFLAGS -d-version=noHwloc"

with the ldc compiler.

D compiler

If you are new to D you should start by installing a D compiler. You have a few choices:

  • DMD the main D compiler, developed by Walter Bright, compiles quickly and is reasonably competitive, but 32 bit only (work toward 64 bit support is being done)

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/dmd-osx.html or http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/dmd-linux.html

  • LDC http://dsource.org/projects/ldc compiler uses the LLVM machinery as backend and the DMD frontend. It is actively developed and works well on linux x86_64. WARNING: current ldc tip with llvm 2.8 has a bug ( http://dsource.org/projects/ldc/ticket/440 ) in one of the d specific optimization passes, add -disable-d-passes to your ldc.conf if you want to use the latest version!
  • GDC http://bitbucket.org/goshawk/gdc/wiki/Home compiler uses the DMD frontend and the gcc backend. Is stable compiles and optimizes well, its development has been resumed recently, and support in tango recently added back, so you might have some small issues. Can be used on many platforms

Tango

Tango http://dsource.org/projects/tango is a standard robust library for D1. You should use the trunk of tango to build blip (or the older frozen version http://github.com/fawzi/oldTango), because the current release has some low probability bugs with respect to threading and fibers. The next release of tango will be supported

There are useful scripts to build tango trunk in the buildTango directory. If you put the tango directory at the same level of the blip directory they will build and install tango. They will install the basic runtime in the libtango-base-dmd.a or libtango-base-ldc.a library, so edit your dmd.conf/ldc.cof file accordingly (-defaultlib=libtango-base-xxx.a -debuglib=libtango-base-xxx.a). You should also remember to add the tango directory and tango/core/vendor to the search path of the compiler (-ItangoDir? -ItangoDir?/tango/core/vendor)

Hwloc

to have automatic detection of your CPUs, and memory hierarchy the hwloc 1.x library from http://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/ is used.

If you don't want to install and use it you should add version=noHwloc

Libev

The socket, rpc, and event based infrastructure (EventManager?) use the scalable event library libev 3.9 from http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html

If you don't want to install and use it you should not use any of those parts of blip and build blip using --no-libev

Blas and Lapack

blas and lapack are used by for some NArray operations. On OSX by default the Accelerate framework is used, and on linux if MKL_ROOT is defined the MKL library is used. To link other libraries put in the environment variable EXTRA_LIBS the requested flags.

If you do not want to use those NArray operations (basic array operations are still defined) you should use version=no_blas and version=no_lapack when compiling

Blip

For blip itself, the git repository is available at

http://github.com/fawzi/

If you have git you can 

    git clone git://github.com/fawzi/blip.git

then 

    cd blip
    ./build.sh --help

and you should get help with the flags and environment variables that influence the build script.

If you have all libraries 

    ./build.sh

should build the blip library (in the libs directory, and a copy should be automatically installed), and the test programs (in the exe directory). If you have disabled some libraries you should build with --no-tests because the automatic compilation of the tests will fail. You might still be able to build some of the tests by hand.

xfbuild

xfbuild http://bitbucket.org/h3r3tic/xfbuild/wiki/Home is not needed, but makes building your own d programs easier (and is fast).

If you installed it you can try to use the dbuild script (that automatically links all the needed stuff).

To compile and link your project you can also simply pass all your D files, the libraries (blip,tango-user,libev,...) to the compiler.

How to D

If you are on linux there is an example on how I did setup a complete D environment without being an administrator (root) on the machine on http://dsource.org/projects/blip/wiki/HowToD , if you are root then you might install at least some package using the normal package manager.

Mpi

mpi has wrappers to the open mpi routines, but that has to be activated explicitly ( the wrapper has been created and tested with openmpi).

Tests

The code has a comprehensive battery of test. By default all of them are built, which especially for testNArray might take some time, if you don't want to build them use pass --no-tests. The tests in testNArray are quite stringent, and with random generation they might be numerically difficult. I did not want to reduce too much the accuracy of the tests, and so in some cases they might fail (especially for single precision without blas, or with a very agressive blas), it this is the case look at the error that they have, probably everything is still ok. On windows there is a limit on the number of symbols that can be defined in a single file, testNArray with all tests would exceed this limit, so by default only the tests for double argument are performed, if you want other you have to activate them by hand.

have fun!

Fawzi