This guide is written as to aid CHPC users in compiling Octave version 3.2.4 from source on the Sun Tsessbe Cluster. Its recommended that you make you use of temporary or scratch directory to do all the compilation in (i.e. ~/scratch or /tmp/$USER), as to save disk space in your home directory.

Also note that for this guide, all binary and libraries are installed home directory, i.e prefix=$HOME. Add the following lines to the end of your .bashrc file

export PATH=/opt/gridware/gcc-4.3/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gridware/gcc-4.3/lib64/:/opt/gridware/gcc-4.3/lib/:$HOME/lib
export F77=gfortran

Logout and log in again,

$ gcc --version
  gcc (GCC) 4.3.4

These prerequisites are not necessary but should boost performance,

“FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)” FFTW Homepage

$ cd ~/scratch
$ wget http://www.fftw.org/fftw-3.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xf fftw-3.3.tar.gz
$ cd fftw-3.3

Make double precision libraries first

$ mkdir BUILD_dp
$ cd BUILD_dp
$ ../configure --prefix=$HOME  --with-pic --with-gnu-ld
$ make
$ make check #test it
$ make install

Make single precision libraries first

$ cd ..
$ mkdir BUILD_sp
$ cd BUILD_sp
$ ../configure --prefix=$HOME  --with-pic --with-gnu-ld --enable-single
$ make
$ make check #test it
$ make install

Since the ftp is blocked on the Tsessbe login node, make use of an http mirror to download octave.

$ cd ~/scratch 
$ wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/octave-3.2.4.tar.bz2
$ tar -xf octave-3.2.4.tar.bz2

 $ cd ~/scratch/octave-3.2.4
 $ mkdir BUILD
 $ cd BUILD

Without any prerequisites packages

 $ ../configure --prefix=$HOME --without-framework-opengl --without-fftw

With additional package/library

 $ export LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/lib"
 $ export CXXFLAGS="-L$HOME/lib"
 $ ../configure --prefix=$HOME --without-framework-opengl 
 

After configuration is complete, alot of warning about missing libraries are given

 $ make

If errors occur such as

• g++: Internal error: Killed (program cc1plus)

wait a while and then make again, as the process was killed by the usage limiter which runs on the login node. If nessary try the approach shown in Compiling GCC from Source.

$ make check

Test summary, when constructing this guide was :

PASS   5428
FAIL      4

$ make install 

Clean up your installation files. Restore/Setup your .bashrc file,

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

for running octave on the worker nodes, you may need to make a copy of the libblas libraries placed in a folder on the ld_library_path …

$ cd $HOME/lib
$ cp /usr/lib64/libblas.* ./