Setting up development environment for the barvinok library

Publish date: Jan 1, 0001
Last updated: May 22, 2021

barvinok is an excellent library for research and development on polyhedral model. It is currently being actively maintained by people of INRIA.

I’m still learning about it so this post I won’t talk about how barvinok works. Instead, I would like to introduce how I managed to successfully install this library. I have a subtle complaint about the installation instructions listed in barvinok’s README. Hopefully, this post can help others who try install barvinok on their machine and easily begin their polyhedral journey.

The installation instructions are mainly from https://repo.or.cz/w/barvinok.git/blob/HEAD:/README.

Environment

What I’m using is a CentOS 7 Linux distribution. But it does not matter too much since in the following I would try to build barvinok, as well as other dependencies from source.

The barvinok version I’m installing is 0.41.3, which you can get from http://barvinok.gforge.inria.fr/.

We want to install all packages, including barvinok and its prerequisites, under PREFIX. PREFIX can be /opt or somewhere else that is accessible without root priviledge. Do remember:

export PATH=${PREFIX}/bin:${PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${PREFIX}/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

Prerequisites

You can build barvinok for different purposes, but here in this post, I’m building barvinok for all of its functionalities, including its core utilies, pet related (specifically, parse_file), and the Python interface.

CMake

We will need CMake to install LLVM. The version we are currently using is 3.13.3.

I think any version larger than 3.4.3 should work, based on this page.

I won’t list how CMake is installed here since it is rather easy and you can possibly find pre-built binaries.

LLVM

LLVM will be required when you try to build external interfaces, e.g., Python. pet needs LLVM as well.

The exact version of LLVM I’m using is 9.0.1. I assume some earlier versions may work too. LLVM-10 can work, but you need to apply some post-release updates to some barvinok’s submodules, which is not desirable.

To build LLVM 9.0.1 -

# Download llvm-9.0.1 from GitHub
wget https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmorg-9.0.1/llvm-project-9.0.1.tar.xz
# Untar
tar xvf llvm-project-9.0.1.tar.xz
# CMake
cd llvm-project-9.0.1 && mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;clang-tools-extra;lld" \
			-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${PREFIX} \
      -DLLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB=ON ../llvm
# Build
make 
# Install
make install

Note that here we should enable clang and make sure LLVM is built with shared library.

GMP

Here I choose version 6.2.0

wget https://gmplib.org/download/gmp/gmp-6.2.0.tar.xz
tar xvf gmp-6.2.0.tar.xz
cd gmp-6.2.0
./configure --prefix=${PREFIX}
make
make check
make install

NTL

I’m using NTL version 11.4.3 and installing it based on the instructions by barvinok.

wget https://shoup.net/ntl/ntl-11.4.3.tar.gz
tar xvf ntl-11.4.3.tar.gz
cd ntl-11.4.3/src
./configure NTL_GMP_LIP=on PREFIX=${PREFIX} SHARED=on GMP_PREFIX=${PREFIX}
make
# This may take a while ...
make check
make install

Python

The bundled Python version is too old on CentOS 7. Therefore, I decide to manually install Python 3.8.3 from source.

wget 
./configure --prefix=${PREFIX} --enable-shared --enable-optimization
make
make test
make install

Barvinok Install

Now all the prerequisites should have been successfully installed. We can move on to installing barvinok.

First of all, we grab the barvinok package by git:

git clone --recurse-submodules git://repo.or.cz/barvinok.git
cd barvinok
git checkout barvinok-0.41.3

Setup install scripts

sh autogen.sh

Configuration & install:

./configure \
	--prefix=${PREFIX} \
	--with-ntl-prefix=${PREFIX} \
  --with-pet=bundled \
  --with-isl=bundled \
  --with-clang-prefix=${PREFIX} \
  --enable-shared-barvinok
make 
make check
make install

Note that here we use all the bundled packages.

Verification

That’s it! If you follow the steps above, the installation should work properly.

Now you can verify the installation.

First checkout the version of iscc , which shows the versions of both barvinok and all the dependencies.

$ iscc --version
isl-0.22.1-347-g7ef6ed0c-IMath-32
barvinok-0.41.3
 -INCREMENTAL
 +PET -OMEGA -CDDLIB -GLPK -TOPCOM +ZSOLVE -PARKER
clang version 9.0.1
pet-0.11.3

You can also launch iscc and enter command parse_file to see whether it is available or not.

Go to the barvinok directory and go under isl/interface, run python3 to check the isl Python interface.

python3 -c 'import isl'

This command should work well.

If everything is fine, I believe you can now start your amazing polyhedral research!