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1st May 2016

OpenFOAM Repo: 4. Third Party Software

OpenFOAM relies some third-party software packages (in addition to OpenMPI) for some important tasks:

The ThirdParty repository contains scripts for compiling these software packages.  The README file contains some information about the compiling the software, but we will provide step-by-step instructions for compiling Scotch/PT-Scotch and ParaView below.

Installing Scotch/PT-Scotch

OpenFOAM requires Scotch/PT-Scotch version 6 and higher since it includes a fix to allow both the libscotch and libptscotch libraries to be linked to the same application.  Version 6 can be installed as a package for most recent versions of Linux, but not Ubuntu, since the Debian package maintainers have failed to upgrade to version 6 since its release in December 2012.  Note that the packaged version of OpenFOAM-dev for Ubuntu contains the object libraries for Scotch/PT-Scotch v6.0.9 built from ThirdParty-dev, as described next.

If a packaged version is not available, Scotch/PT-Scotch v6.0.9 can be installed simply by going into the ThirdParty directory (e.g. ThirdParty-dev) where the sources can be compiled by running the Allwmake script.

./Allwmake

Note that the Allwmake script is set up to be able to compile other packages, e.g. GCAL, but these packages are ignored unless the source code is downloaded to the ThirdParty directory.

Installing ParaView

For the current supported version of ParaView , the source code is downloaded automatically. It compiles without modification, except for GCC v10+, when it is automatically patched by the installation script.  ParaView is compiled by running the makeParaView script, i.e.

./makeParaView

Expect ParaView to take a long time to compile, typically several hours on a desktop computer. Following compilation, update the environment by sourcing the .bashrc (or .cshrc) file as described in 3. Setting the Environment or by typing

wmRefresh

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