Installation

You will need to download and compile the code before you can use it; we do not supply binaries.

Downloading

CONQUEST is accessed from the GitHub repository; it can be cloned:

git clone https://github.com/OrderN/CONQUEST-release destination-directory

where destination-directory should be set by the user. Alternatively, it can be downloaded from GitHub as a zip file and unpacked:

https://github.com/OrderN/CONQUEST-release/archive/master.zip

Go to top

Compiling

Once you have the distribution, you will need to compile the main Conquest code (found in the src/ directory), along with the ion file generation code (found in the tools/ directory). Conquest requires a working MPI installation including a Fortran90 compiler (often mpif90 but this can vary), along with a few standard libraries:

  • BLAS and LAPACK (normally provided by the system vendor)

  • FFTW 3.x (more detail can be found at http://www.fftw.org/)

  • ScaLAPACK (often provided as part of an HPC system; the source code can be obtained from the netlib repository if you need to compile it)

Additionally, Conquest can use LibXC if it is available (v4.x or later).

The library locations are set in the system.make file in the src/system directory, along with other parameters needed for compilation. The default file name is system.make but you can select another file with make SYSTEM=label which would then use the file system.label.make in the src/system directory. system.<systemname>.make files are provided for some HPC systems used by the community, but if you want to run locally or on a different system, you will need to create an appropriate system.make file. Use src/system/system.example.make as a starting point.

  • FC (typically FC=mpif90 will be all that is required)

  • COMPFLAGS (set these to specify compiler options such as optimisation)

  • BLAS (specify the BLAS and LAPACK libraries)

  • SCALAPACK (specify the ScaLAPACK library)

  • FFT_LIB (must be left as FFTW)

  • XC_LIBRARY (choose XC_LIBRARY=CQ for the internal Conquest library, otherwise XC_LIBRARY=LibXC_v4 for LibXC v4.x, or XC_LIBRARY=LibXC_v5 for LibXC v5.x and v6.x)

  • Two further options need to be set for LibXC:

    • XC_LIB (specify the XC libraries)

    • XC_COMPFLAGS (specify the location of the LibXC include and module files, e.g. -I/usr/local/include)

Once these are set, you should make the executable using make.

The ion file generation code is compiled using the same options required for the main code.

Go to top

Multi-threading

CONQUEST can use OpenMP for multi-threading; some multi-threading is available throughout the code, while there are specific matrix multiplication routines which can use multi-threading for the linear scaling solver. The number of threads is set via the environment variable OMP_NUM_THREADS.

Compiler flags to enable OpenMP are dependent on the vendor, but should be specified via OMPFLAGS in the system.make file. If compiling with OpenMP then you should also change the variable OMP_DUMMY in the same file to be blank to enable the number of threads to be included in the output.

On some systems, the default stack size for OpenMP is set to be rather small, and this can cause a segmentation fault when running with multiple threads. We recommend testing the effect of the environment variable OMP_STACKSIZE (and suggest setting it to 50M or larger as a first test).

Go to top

Installing with Spack

CONQUEST and all of its dependencies can be installed with Spack. The CONQUEST package requires Spack v0.21 or later. If Spack isn’t available or up to date on your system, it is relatively straightforward to install it with user permissions following the install instructions. When setting up Spack on a new system, it is recommended to configure it to use available system compilers and system packages. Once spack is installed and set up, install CONQUEST with:

spack install conquest

and load the Conquest executable to PATH with

spack load conquest

The build can be customized by adding options to the Spack spec conquest. The CONQUEST package includes variants for OpenMP support and different matrix multiplication kernels; more details can be found in the Spack CONQUEST package.

Go to top