Compile with Spack

What is Spack?

Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software on a wide variety of platforms and environments. It was designed for large supercomputing centers, where many users and application teams share common installations of software on clusters with exotic architectures, using libraries that do not have a standard ABI.

For RevBayes, it handles installing and linking the Boost and MPI dependencies for you. It also handles differences in the build process between versions.

Pre-requisites

You will need to have C++ compiler installed on your computer, along with git, make, curl, and python. On OSX, XCode is required.

Set up

git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git
cd spack
source share/spack/setup-env.sh
spack compiler find

Compile and Run

Latest stable version

Without MPI

spack install revbayes ~mpi
spack load revbayes
rb

With MPI

spack install revbayes +mpi
spack load revbayes
mpirun rb-mpi

Development version

Without MPI

spack install revbayes@develop ~mpi
spack load revbayes
rb

With MPI

spack install revbayes@develop +mpi
spack load revbayes
mpirun rb-mpi

Older version

You can install older versions by replacing @develop in the development version commands with @version. E.g.

spack install revbayes@1.0.12 ~mpi.

To get a list of available versions run:

spack info revbayes

Troubleshooting

Error: revbayes@develop matches multiple packages.

The error message should have a list of of packages like so:

Matching packages:
    abe2xnq revbayes@develop%gcc@9.2.1 arch=linux-fedora31-skylake
    l6sv4oz revbayes@develop%gcc@9.2.1 arch=linux-fedora31-skylake

The text before revbayes in each line is the hash for the package. You can get more information on the difference between the two packages by doing:

Package 1:

spack find --deps /abe2xnq

Which shows

-- linux-fedora31-skylake / gcc@9.2.1 ---------------------------
revbayes@develop
    boost@1.72.0
        bzip2@1.0.8
        zlib@1.2.11

Package 2:

spack find --deps /l6sv4oz

Which shows

==> 1 installed package
-- linux-fedora31-skylake / gcc@9.2.1 ---------------------------
revbayes@develop
    boost@1.72.0
        bzip2@1.0.8
        zlib@1.2.11
    openmpi@3.1.5
        hwloc@1.11.11
            libpciaccess@0.13.5
            libxml2@2.9.9
                libiconv@1.16
                xz@5.2.4
            numactl@2.0.12

The difference here is that l6sv4oz was compiled with mpi support.

We can load it with

spack load /l6sv4oz