When using build_visit
without any arguments it will do a minimal build of VisIt downloading the VisIt source code by making an anonymous git clone from GitHub and downloading the source code for the third party libraries from NERSC. It will build a serial version of the code without any of the optional I/O libraries. This will result in only the file readers that require no external dependencies to be built. Buiding VisIt in this fashion will give you the highest probability of success.
./build_visit3_0_1
When build_visit
is run by default it will build the code using a single core. This may take a half a day or longer. Modern computers have anywhere from 4 to 80 cores at the time of the writing of this chapter. You can speed up the build process by specify that build_visit
use more cores. If you are using a shared resource you probably shouldn't use all the cores in consideration of other users of the system. The following example specifies using 4 cores.
./build_visit3_0_1 --makeflags -j4
When build_visit
is run by default it will install the third party libraries in the directory third_party
in the current directory. If you would like to install the libraries in another directory for the purposes of sharing them with other users of the system, you can have build_visit
install them in a different directory. The following example specifies installing the third party libraries in a another location.
./build_visit3_0_1 --thirdparty-path /usr/gapps/visit/third_party
Building with the HDF5 and Silo libraries
Some of the more common I/O libraries that will result in building a larger number of file readers are HDF5 and Silo. The following example specifies building HDF5 and Silo.
./build_visit3_0_1 --hdf5 --silo
If you are feeling lucky you can have build_visit
build all of the optional I/O libraries that have a high probability of building. The following example specifies building the more reliable of the optional I/O libraries.
./build_visit3_0_1 --optional
Using a VisIt source code tar file
You can also have visit use the prepackaged source code for a specific version of VisIt instead of doing a git download of the source code. The tar file should be considerably smaller than a git clone. The following example uses the VisIt source code corresponding to the official 3.0.1 release of VisIt.
./build_visit3_0_1 --optional --tarball visit3.0.1.tar.gz
If build_visit
is interrupted while it is executing, it is suggested that you remove the directories associated with the last package it was in the process of building. build_visit
always leaves directories intact when it runs to aid with troubleshooting failures. Likewise, build_visit
doesn't remove existing directories before starting to build a package. This can sometimes problems when build_visit
is interrupted and you restart the build again.
Once you have successfully built VisIt, there are a couple of directions you can go. The first option is to use it in the location where it was built. The executable can run by executing the following command:
visit/build/bin/visit
if you built using a git clone.
visit3.0.1/build/bin/visit
if you built using a tar file.
The second option is to create a distribution file that you can install using visit-install
. This can be done by executing the following command:
cd visit/build
make package
if you built using a git clone.
cd visit3.0.1/build
make package
if you built using a tar file.