Getting setup

Contents

Getting setup#

POLARIS aims to be cross-compilable on both Windows and Linux (including HPC cluster distributions). In general you will need to install the following tools to compile POLARIS:

  • git

  • cmake 3.15.4 or newer

  • a C++17 compatible compiler

    • gcc 9.3 or 10 (not recommended for debugging)

    • Clang 10.0.0

    • Visual Studio 2022

  • Python 3.8 or newer

Generally you will also need an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to pull all the above tools together for an actual development workflow. Currently the team uses a mixture of two main IDEs:

  1. Visual Studio

    • Pros - already installed for compiler, good debugger

    • Cons - terrible Git support, hard to change branches, hard to use python based build tool

  2. VS Code

    • Pros - great Git support, faster intellisense and code navigation, highly capable plugin system, can be used for WSL or remote Linux machines

    • Cons - debugging support isn’t as good as Visual Studio

See the below guides for getting these setup on your OS.

Quick Start#

No matter what platform you are on or tool you are using you will need to:

  1. Clone the repository

    • git clone https://git-out.gss.anl.gov/polaris/code/polaris-linux.git

  2. Run the python build tool to generate build files (Makefile or Visual Studio Project) for your platform

    • python build.py -cb -i

    • This will configure (-c) and compile (-b) the code and prompt you interactively (-i) for any required information (like the dependencies path)

The following shows this in practice:

cd $HOME        # Go to your home directory
mkdir -p git    # Create a sub-dir for repositories from git
cd git
git clone https://git-out.gss.anl.gov/polaris/code/polaris-linux.git   
python -cb -i

If all you want is a compiled executable, this is all you need. However if you want to modify code, experiment and recompile, you should read the guide appropriate to your workflow. If you don’t know which workflow you want - we recommend the VS Code approach as it has the lowest friction setup.

Contents