Neper installation on HPC

[xshang93]

Hi, I'm trying to install neper on to the HPC of our university. When it comes to "make install", I got the following error:

Install the project...
-- Install configuration: "Release"
-- Installing: /home/<path_name>/neper/src/bin/neper
CMake Error at cmake_install.cmake:45 (file):
  file RPATH_CHANGE could not write new RPATH:

  to the file:
 /home/<path_name>/neper/src/bin/neper

  Error opening file for update.

I checked the neper file being generated in /src/bin/, and it's read and executable only. The neper manual says to install Neper as root, but I'm not a SU of our HPC. Please note that /home/<path_name>/neper/src/bin/ is my local path.

Is there a way to solve this?

Thank you.

[xshang93]

Ok. So I have found a solution, and I thought I'd share it here in case anyone in the future also looking to have Neper installed on a cluster.
The error is caused by RPATH_CHANGE trying to change the original RPATH to a new one, which is an empty one. When I looked at cmake_install.cmake in neper/src/build/, I found the following:

  if(EXISTS "$ENV{DESTDIR}${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin/neper" AND
     NOT IS_SYMLINK "$ENV{DESTDIR}${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin/neper")
    file(RPATH_CHANGE
         FILE "$ENV{DESTDIR}${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin/neper"
         OLD_RPATH "<home path>/neper/src/build/contrib/scotch:<home path>/neper/src/build/contrib/nlopt:"
         NEW_RPATH "")

My understanding is that cmake is trying to change the RPATH to scotch and nlopt (I was using the built-in versions) to an empty directory. Judging from the if statement, this happens because I changed my installation directory to my own project folder, which should be a must for most working with a cluster, as you don't have access to other shared areas in the file system.

The solution is simple enough - just comment out where RPATH is being changed, like so:

  if(EXISTS "$ENV{DESTDIR}${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin/neper" AND
     NOT IS_SYMLINK "$ENV{DESTDIR}${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin/neper")
#    file(RPATH_CHANGE
#         FILE "$ENV{DESTDIR}${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin/neper"
#         OLD_RPATH "<home path>/neper/src/build/contrib/scotch:<home path>/neper/src/build/contrib/nlopt:"
#        NEW_RPATH "")

Et voilà!

Disclaimer: I'm not by any means someone who knows about software compiling. All these are concluded from my search & experimenting. There might be obvious mistakes but it worked for me, and I certainly hope it'll help others in the same situation.

Cheers,
XS

[xshang93]

Didn't think that is a thing! If it can be done this simple, what's the advantage of compiling it?

[rquey]

make compiles, and make install copies the resulting binary to a system directory. I was talking about replacing make install here. You still need to compile, of course.

[xshang93]

Right. As you can see, I'm showing my ignorance on this part. So my question rephrases as, "if it can be done this simple, why are we instructed to make install rather than just copy the binary?"

[xshang93]

by the way, there is another issue I raised that is both Neper and FEPX related. I posted it in FEPX discussion but it would be great if you could take a look. https://github.com/acmelab-ua/FEPX/discussions/59

Thank you, as always, for your help!

[rquey]

Right. As you can see, I'm showing my ignorance on this part. So my question rephrases as, "if it can be done this simple, why are we instructed to make install rather than just copy the binary?"

The common practice is to copy the binary to a system directory to make it available system-wide. Copying to a local folder makes it available to you only, and the local folder must be included in your PATH...