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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, priori to compile SLOTH several environment variables must be defined:

export MFEM_DIR=$(echo `brew --prefix mfem`)

export MPI_DIR=$(echo `brew --prefix open-mpi`)

export HYPRE_DIR=$(echo `brew --prefix hypre`)

export METIS_DIR=$(echo `brew --prefix metis`)

On the use of the envSloth.sh configuration file

These definitions are written into the configuration file envSloth.sh located in the root directory of the SLOTH repository. The use of this file is recommended to load the MFEM environment before compilling SLOTH.

  • Load the SLOTH configuration file: 
    source ../envSloth.sh [OPTIONS]
    where [OPTIONS] are: 
        --release to build with Release compiler options 

    --optim to build with Optim compiler options 

    --debug to build with Debug compiler options 

    --coverage to build with Coverage compiler options 

    --minsizerel to build with MinSizeRel compiler options 

    --relwithdebinfo to build with RelWithDebInfo compiler options 

    --external to built SLOTH with an external package

By default, SLOTH is built with release compiler options.

  • Finally, compile 
    make -j N
    with N the number of jobs.