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Building Spirit on Windows

Binary packages are currently not provided! Therefore, you need to build the Spirit core library or the desktop user interface yourself.

The Spirit framework is designed to run across different platforms and uses CMake for its build process, which will generate the appropriate build scripts for each platform.

Core library

The Visual Studio Version needs to be specified and it usually makes sense to specify 64bit, as it otherwise defaults to 32bit. The version number and year may be different for you, Win64 can be appended to any of them. Execute cmake -G to get a listing of the available generators.

# enter the top-level Spirit directory
$ cd spirit

# make a build directory and enter that
$ mkdir build
$ cd build

# Generate a solution file
$ cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" ..

# Either open the .sln with Visual Studio, or run
$ cmake --build . --config Release

You can also open the CMake GUI and configure and generate the project solution there. The solution file can be opened and built using Visual Studio, which is especially useful for debugging.

Desktop GUI

By default, the desktop GUI will try to build. The corresponding CMake option is SPIRIT_UI_CXX_USE_QT.

Additional requirements

  • Qt >= 5.7 (including qt-charts)
  • OpenGL drivers >= 3.3

Necessary OpenGL drivers should be available through the regular drivers for any remotely modern graphics card.

Note that in order to build with Qt as a dependency on Windows, you may need to add path/to/qt/qtbase/bin to your PATH variable.

Python package

The Python package is built by default. The corresponding CMake option is SPIRIT_BUILD_FOR_PYTHON. The package is then located at core/python. You can then

  • make it locatable, e.g. by adding path/to/spirit/core/python to your PYTHONPATH
  • cd core/python and pip install -e . --user to install it

Alternatively, the most recent release version can be installed from the official package, e.g. pip install spirit --user.

OpenMP backend

Using OpenMP on Windows is not officially supported. While it is possible to use it, the build process is nontrivial.

CUDA backend

The CUDA backend can be used to speed up calculations by using a GPU.

At least version 8 of the CUDA toolkit is required and the GPU needs compute capability 3.0 or higher!

Note that the GUI cannot be used on the CUDA backend on Windows! (see the CUDA programming guide: coherency and requirements)

Note: the precision of the core will be automatically set to float in order to avoid the performance cost of double precision operations on GPUs.

Build

You need to set the corresponding SPIRIT_USE_CUDA CMake variable, e.g. by calling

cd build
cmake -DSPIRIT_USE_CUDA=ON ..
cd ..

or by setting the option in the CMake GUI and re-generating.

You may additionally need to

  • manually set the host compiler ("C:/Program Files (x86)/.../bin/cl.exe)
  • manually set the CUDA Toolkit directory in the CMake GUI or pass the CUDA_TOOLKIT_ROOT_DIR to cmake or edit it in the root CMakeLists.txt
  • select the appropriate arch for your GPU using the SPIRIT_CUDA_ARCH CMake variable
  • add the CUDA Toolkit directory to the Windows PATH, so that the libraries will be found when the code is executed

Web assembly library

Using emscripten, Spirit can be built as a Web assembly library, meaning that it can be used e.g. from within JavaScript.

The CMake option you need to set to ON is called SPIRIT_BUILD_FOR_JS.

The build process on Windows has not been tested by us and we do not officially support it.

Further build configuration options

More options than described above are available, allowing for example to deactivate building the Python library or the unit tests.

To list all available build options, call

cd build
cmake -LH ..

The build options of Spirit all start with SPIRIT_.