Using AMDiS with cmake

With this short page, I will show you, how to use the cmake buildsystem with AMDiS. The introduction consists of two main parts:
  1. compiling and installing AMDiS with CMake
  2. using the cmake installed AMDiS in your project
  3. some frequently asked questions

Compiling and installing AMDiS with CMake

configure

There are 3 different configure tools for CMake:

I will use the cmake and ccmake. The autoconf/automake implementation was used directly inside the AMDiS source directory (i.e. the directory you get through svn). To use the CMake buildsystem, I recommend a different directory structure for building and compiling AMDiS. The script getamdis_cmake.sh, which can be found on gforge.zih.tu-dresden.de, creates such a directory structure.

Assume, you have AMDiS downloaded in the directory

/home/joe/work/

, the AMDiS source directory is

/home/joe/work/amdis/AMDiS

. To configure and compile AMDiS I recommend to create a directory

/home/joe/work/amdis_build

and run

cd /home/joe/work/amdis_build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${HOME}/programs/ ../amdis/AMDiS

Compilation and installation is the same as with automake/autoconf:

make ; make install

The last command will install AMDiS to /home/joe/programs fast and simple configuration configuration with options If you only want to build with standard options, you can simply run cmake .

Using the cmake installed AMDiS in your project

A cmake-project consists of the source files and a file CMakeLists.txt, which contains a description of needed libraries, headers and programs. If you have a simple project with one program "fooProg", which have to compile only one source file "src/foo.cc", your CMakeLists.txt consist of the following lines:

project(projectName)
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

find_package(AMDiS REQUIRED)
if(AMDiS_FOUND)
include(${AMDiS_USE_FILE})
add_executable(fooProg src/foo.cc)
target_link_libraries(fooProg ${AMDiS_LIBRARIES})
endif(AMDiS_FOUND)

The first two lines

project(projectName)
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

tell cmake the name of your project and that you whish to use only cmake versions newer than 2.8.
The line

find_package(AMDiS REQUIRED)

tells cmake, that you want to use AMDiS and it should complain if AMDiS was not found. CMake will print an error message, bu will not stop the execution! With the command

include(${AMDiS_USE_FILE})

we read an AMDiS specific configuration file, which sets some compilerflags and adds the include directorys. The program is added with

add_executable(fooProg src/foo.cc)

and we have to tell cmake, that we need the library amdis and each library amdis depends on. This is done with the command

target_link_libraries(fooProg ${AMDiS_LIBRARIES})

If cmake does not find AMDiS, you have to set the variable AMDIS_DIR to the directory containing the file AMDiSConfig.cmake. This file resides in

$CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/share/amdis/

Frequently asked questions

Boost

If you have different boost versions on your system and you do not want to use the standard version in /usr/lib and /usr/include, you should set the environment variable BOOST_ROOT to your boost-installation.

I will not set the AMDIS_DIR in every project.

If you always use the same AMDiS directory, you can add the directory to your PATH variable.