Installing Sundials

CHIMES requires the CVODE library of Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solvers, from the Sundials package (v4.0 or later). If Sundials is not already installed on your system, it can be downloaded here.

Once you have downloaded Sundials from the above website, you can then untar it and build it. You will need cmake to build Sundials. The INSTALL_GUIDE.pdf included with the Sundials download describes this process in detail, but in brief these are the steps that you will need:

tar -zxvf sundials-5.1.0.tar.gz
cd sundials-5.1.0
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/dir/ -DBUILD_ARKODE=OFF -DBUILD_CVODE=ON -DBUILD_CVODES=OFF -DBUILD_IDA=OFF -DBUILD_IDAS=OFF -DBUILD_KINSOL=OFF -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON -DBUILD_STATIC_LIBS=ON -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-O2" -DEXAMPLES_ENABLE_C=OFF -DSUNDIALS_PRECISION=double ../
make
make install

In the above example, after untar’ing the sundials download we create a new build directory inside sundials-5.1.0, and then cd build before running cmake. This is needed because the build directory has to be different from the source directory.

Also, we only need the CVODE library, so in this example we have switched off building the various other libraries that are included in the Sundials package, as these are not required by CHIMES.

You will need to ensure that both the Sundials library and CHIMES are built with the same precision (either single or double; see the Building CHIMES section). We recommend that new users build CHIMES in double precision, so in this example we use the -DSUNDIALS_PRECISION=double option to build Sundials in double precision as well. For single precision, you can use -DSUNDIALS_PRECISION=single. Note that if Sundials is already installed on your system it is likely that it uses double precision, which is the default for Sundials.

Finally, you will need to set the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX path to a directory where you have write access. This is where the libraries will be installed.

Once you have installed Sundials, you will need to add /path/to/install/dir/lib (or possibly /path/to/install/dir/lib64, depending on your system) to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, both when you compile CHIMES and when you run it. The command to set this variable depends on which shell you are using (to determine which shell you are using, you can run echo $SHELL in your terminal). The commands for two commonly used shells are as follows:

For bash, use:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/install/dir/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

For tcsh, use:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /path/to/install/dir/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

The above examples assume that LD_LIBRARY_PATH already exists, and prepends the Sundials path to it (which preserves any other paths that are already defined there). If it does not already exist, you will need to omit the :$LD_LIBRARY_PATH from the end of the command.

You can run this command every time you compile or run CHIMES. Or, for convenience, you can simply add this command to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.tcshrc file (for your given shell), which will then define LD_LIBRARY_PATH every time you open a terminal.