Building AMReX

In this chapter, we discuss AMReX’s build systems. Additionally, it is also possible to install AMReX using Spack (https://spack.io/). For more information see the Spack section.

There are three ways to use AMReX’s build systems. Most AMReX developers use GNU Make. With this approach, there is no installation step; application codes adopt AMReX’s build system and compile AMReX while compiling their own codes. This will be discussed in more detail in the section on Building with GNU Make.

The second approach is to build and install AMReX as a library using GNU make (Building libamrex); an application code then uses its own build system and links to AMReX as an external library.

Finally, AMReX can also be built with CMake, as detailed in the section on Building with CMake.

AMReX requires a C++ compiler that supports the C++17 standard, a Fortran compiler that supports the Fortran 2003 standard, and a C compiler that supports the C99 standard. Prerequisites for building with GNU Make include Python (>= 2.7, including 3) and standard tools available in any Unix-like environments (e.g., Perl and sed). For building with CMake, the minimal requirement is version 3.18.

Please note that we fully support AMReX for Linux systems in general and on the DOE supercomputers (e.g. Cori, Summit) in particular. Many of our users do build and use AMReX on Macs but we do not have the resources to fully support Mac users.

• Building with GNU Make
  • Dissecting a Simple Make File
  • Tweaking the Make System
  • Specifying your own compiler
  • GCC on macOS
  • Fortran
  • ccache
• Building libamrex
• Building with CMake
  • Customization options
  • CMake and macOS
  • Importing AMReX into your CMake project
• AMReX on Windows
• Spack