ALPS installation on Mac/Linux from sources

Prerequisites: HPC libraries and tools

Please make sure to have the following third-party software installed and available:

Third-Party Dependencies
- MPI
- HDF5 >= 1.10.0
- BLAS
- CMake >= 2.8
- Python > 3.9 (if Python bindings are enabled)
- Boost sources >= 1.68

These packages are external to ALPS. Their installation will depend on your computer. MPI is the Message Passing Interface, several standard implementations exist, including OpenMPI and MPICH. High performance computers will have proprietary MPI installations, and most clusters provide a version for all users. HDF5 is a library for binary data storage. More information on BLAS, the Basic Linear Algebra System, can be found on netlib.org. However, most computers provide highly optimized versions tuned for their respective hardware. Do NOT install the reference BLAS from netlib but instead have a look at a generic high-performance implementation from OpenBLAS and the hardware-specific vendor libraries (among many others: Apple, Intel MKL/OneAPI, AMD AOCL, IBM ESSL). Cmake is a build system that will find the locations of the above packages and generate compilation instructions in Makefiles.

Prerequisites: Python Libraries

Please make sure to have python and the following dependencies:

Third-Party Python Dependencies
- numpy
- scipy

These are third-party packages that you can install using your favorite python package manager, such as pip:

$ pip install numpy scipy

The minimal supported python version is 3.9 (any minor version up to 3.12.x should work). Note that some installations use pip3 instead of pip, for help on python package installation see https://pypi.org/project/pip/ .

Prerequisites: Boost sources

Download and unpack boost library. The following will download and unpack Boost v1.81.0

$ wget https://archives.boost.io/release/1.81.0/source/boost_1_81_0.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf boost_1_81_0.tar.gz

We have tested building ALPS with Boost versions 1.76.0 through 1.81.0 (please refere to the build notes for the combination of supported boost versions with different compilers and Python version)

Download and Build

The following instructions will download and build ALPS (replace /path/to/install/directory with the directory where you’d like to install the code):

$ git clone https://github.com/alpsim/legacy alps-src
$ cmake -S alps-src -B alps-build                                     \
       -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=</path/to/install/dir>                  \
       -DBoost_ROOT_DIR=</directory/with/boost/sources>/boost_1_81_0  \
       -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-DBOOST_NO_AUTO_PTR                         \
       -DBOOST_FILESYSTEM_NO_CXX20_ATOMIC_REF"
$ cmake --build alps-build -j 8
$ cmake --build alps-build -t test

Build notes

The following combinations of Boost, Python and c++ compiler have been tested:

GCC 10.5.0, Python 3.9.19 and Boost 1.76.0
GCC 11.4.0, Python 3.10.14 and Boost 1.81.0, 1.86.0
GCC 12.3.0, Python 3.10.14 and Boost 1.81.0, 1.86.0
Clang 13.0.1, Python 3.10.14 and Boost 1.81.0, 1.86.0
Clang 14.0.0, Python 3.10.14 and Boost 1.81.0, 1.86.0
Clang 15.0.7, Python 3.10.14 and Boost 1.81.0, 1.86.0

ALPS has been tested on ARM-based MacOS using both default compiler and Homebrew gcc compiler with Boost 1.86.0. On MacOS >=14.6 in order to succesfully build ALPS using Homebrew gcc compiler, the following environment variable have to be set:

export SDKROOT=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX14.sdk/

If you have a non-standard installation location of the dependent packages installed in step 1, cmake will fail to find the package. ALPS uses the standard cmake mechanism (FindXXX.cmake) to find packages. The following pointers may help:

For MPI: Follow the instructions on cmake with mpi
For BLAS: Follow the instructions on cmake with BLAS
For HDF5: Follow the instructions on cmake with HDF5

After successfully building the code, you will need to install it. The install location is specified with -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/directory as a cmake command during configuration or can be changed by explicitly providing a new installation path to the --prefix parameter during the installation phase (see cmake manual). To install the code run:

$ cmake --install alps-build

Your install directory will be created; if everything was successful you can find ALPS executables such as mc' or fulldiag’ under the bin directory of your installation path.