[Beowulf] Building OpenFOAM

[Christopher Samuel]

On 12/11/16 02:04, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> I've heard about how difficult building OpenFOAM was for years. I don't
> think it's all that difficult, it just takes a LOT of time to build,  so
> when errors are encountered, the iteration time between multiple. The
> real difficulty arises from how poorly documented the build process is.
> It's like a single page. And since it uses it's own shell scripts to
> manage the build process, instead of using GNU Autoconf tools, I've had
> to figure out how it works, and spend days digging though shell scripts
> to figure out the proper place to add include and lib directories.

I suspect our experience has been affected by having to build it for
BlueGene/Q as well, where you have to patch their builds.

We've found that if something goes wrong the only really reliable way to
restart is to delete the entire source tree, unpack it again, patch it
and start from scratch.

Sort of like the way that EasyBuild does everything (though of course
that has other issues).

All the best,
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci