Building SimEng

Prerequisites

Building SimEng requires CMake and a compiler that supports C++17.

Building

  1. Obtain the source code using git:

git clone https://github.com/UoB-HPC/SimEng.git

  1. Configure with CMake, specifying the path to your desired installation directory if necessary:

cd SimEng
cmake -B build -S .
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE={Release, Debug, RelWithDebInfo, MinSizeRel}
        -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<simeng_install_directory>
        -DSIMENG_ENABLE_TESTS={ON, OFF} #Defaults to OFF

With this configuration, the build files will be generated in a directory called “build”.

  1. The SimEng test suites depend on a selection of LLVM libraries. Building this dependency can take a while, therefore, the use of prebuilt LLVM libraries is supported. The following CMake configuration flags should be set to enable this:

    -DSIMENG_USE_EXTERNAL_LLVM=ON
-DLLVM_DIR=<llvm_library_directory> # directory of LLVM libraries as CMake targets

Note

More information about the LLVM_DIR value can be found here.

Note

LLVM versions greater than 14 or less than 8 are not supported. We’d recommend using LLVM 14.0.5 where possible as this has been verified by us to work correctly.

  1. Two additional flags are available when building SimEng. Firstly is -DSIMENG_SANITIZE={ON, OFF} which adds a selection of sanitisation compilation flags (primarily used during the development of the framework). Secondly is -SIMENG_OPTIMIZE={ON, OFF} which attempts to optimise the framework’s compilation for the host machine through a set of compiler flags and options.

We recommend using the Ninja build system for faster builds, especially if not using pre-built LLVM libraries. After installation, it can be enabled through the addition of the -GNinja flag in the above CMake build command.

  1. Once configured, use cmake --build build or whichever generator you have selected for CMake to build. Append the -j{Num_Cores} flag to build in parallel, keep in mind that building without a linked external LLVM library usually has very high (1.5GB per core) memory requirements.

  2. (Optional) Run cmake --build build --target test to run the SimEng regression tests and unit tests. Please report any test failures as a GitHub issue.

  3. Finally, run cmake --build build --target install to install SimEng to the directory specified with CMake.