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On MacOS with Homebrew

Following the MFEM website, the simplest way to install MFEM on MacOS consists in using the package manager Homebrew (see https://brew.sh for more details):

brew install mfem

Installing a given version of MFEM

By default, this MFEM installation depends on hypre, metis, openblas, suite-sparse.

It is possible rebuild MFEM with additional dependencies (see https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/mfem#default for more details). To do this,

  • Get the .rb file : run brew edit mfem to open the default rb file or get it from Github
  • Add your dependencies with depends_on directive. Here, let us consider the petsc dependency:
depends_on "cmake" => :build
depends_on "hypre"       
depends_on "metis"       
depends_on "openblas"
depends_on "suite-sparse"
depends_on "petsc"
  • Save the file in the directory and run the following command:
brew install --formula mfem.rb

Installation with petsc can be checked by editing once again the mfem.rb file. petsc must be mentioned as default dependency.

Each dependency can be installed easily using homebrew.

Once MFEM is installed, SLOTH can be built using the envSloth.sh shell script. This script loads MFEM, defines several environment variables, and compiles SLOTH.

Build SLOTH using the envSloth.sh shell script

The envSloth.sh shell script cannot be run directly from the root of the SLOTH repository. Users must create a separate build directory to compile SLOTH.

Installing Sympy

Please ensure that Sympy is installed. Sympy is a mandatory prerequisite to build SLOTH as it is used to handle physical properties.

Once, MFEM and Sympy are installed, please run the following command to build SLOTH:

mkdir build 
cd build

bash ../envSloth.sh [OPTIONS]
where [OPTIONS] are: 
    --release        Build with Release compiler options

    --optim          Build with Optim compiler options

    --debug          Build with Debug compiler options

    --coverage       Build with Coverage compiler options

    --minsizerel     Build with MinSizeRel compiler options

    --relwithdebinfo Build with RelWithDebInfo compiler options

    --external       Build SLOTH with an external package

    --shared         Build a shared library for Sloth

    --install        Specify the installation path for Sloth 
                     (default: a "SlothInstallation" directory at the same level as the repository)

    --np             Specify the number of CPUs to use for compilation (default: 4)

By default, this command builds a static library of SLOTH with release compiler options.

Building a shared library of SLOTH

The --shared option enables building a shared library of SLOTH. However, the user must ensure that the library type used for MFEM is compatible. Certain combinations of static and shared libraries may require specific compiler options, such as -fPIC.

The make command within the envSloth.sh script does not compile the tests. To compile tests after SLOTH has been built, run the following command:

make tests -j N

where N is a number of CPUs to use for building the tests in parallel.

Once the tests are compiled, users can verify the build by running all tests with ctest:

ctest -j N

Finally, users can install the SLOTH library, headers, and scripts into the SlothInstallation directory by running:

make install

Installing SLOTH in user-defined repository

By default, SLOTH is installed in a SlothInstallation directory at the same level as the repository.

Users can be specify another directory with the --install option of the envSloth.sh script.