kmsmith137 / rf_kernels

Fast C++/assembly kernels for RFI removal and related tasks

RF_KERNELS

Fast C++/assembly kernels for RFI removal and related tasks. This is a core library for CHIMEFRB/bonsai and kmsmith137/rf_pipelines.

Some day, rf_kernels will be systematically documented! For now, here are its installation instructions.

INSTALLATION

• The rf_kernels Makefile assumes the existence of a file Makefile.local which defines the following machine-dependent Makefile variables:

    INCDIR     Installation directory for C++ header files
    LIBDIR     Installation directory for libraries
    CPP        C++ compiler executable + flags, see below for tips!
  

  Rather than write a Makefile.local from scratch, I recommend that you start with one of the examples in the site/ directory, which contains Makefile.locals for a few frequently-used CHIME machines. In particular, site/Makefile.local.kms_laptop16 is a recent osx machine, and site/Makefile.local.frb1 is a recent CentOS Linux machine. (If you're a member of CHIME and you're using one of these machines, you can just symlink the appropriate file in site/ to ./Makefile.local)

• Do make all install to build.

• Do make test if you want to run some unit tests.

• If you have trouble getting rf_kernels to build/work, then the problem probably has something to do with your compiler flags (specified as part of CPP) or environment variables. Here are a few hints:

  • You probably need -std=c++11 in your compiler flags, for C++11 support
  • You probably need -pthread in your compiler flags, in order to compile some multithreaded timing tests.
  • You probably need -march=native in your compiler flags, to get AVX/AVX2 intrinsics. (I usually use optimization flags -O3 -march=native -ffast-math -funroll-loops.)
  • If you're compiling with gcc, I recommend adding '--param inline-unit-growth=10000' to the command line. This allows more aggressive inlining, and improves performance significantly, at least on the CHIME compute nodes.
  • You probably want -Wall -fPIC in your compiler flags on general principle.
  • The rf_kernels build procedure assumes that the current directory is searched for header files and libraries, i.e. you should have -I. -L. in your compiler flags.
  • You also probably want -I$(INCDIR) -L$(LIBDIR) in your compiler flags, so that these install dirs are also searched for headers/libraries (e.g. simpulse)
  • You may need more -I and -L flags to find all necessary headers/libraries.
  • If everything compiles but libraries are not being found at runtime, then you probably need to add . or LIBDIR to the appropriate environment variable ($LD_LIBRARY_PATH in Linux, or $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH in osx)

  Feel free to email me if you have trouble!