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Setting up the Blaze library on a particular system is a fairly easy two step process. Since Blaze is a template library and therefore mainly consists of header files no compilation is required. In the following, this two step process is explained in detail, preceded only by a short summary of the requirements.
In order for Blaze to work properly, the Boost library must be installed on the system. It is recommended to use the newest Boost library available, but Blaze requires at minimum the Boost version 1.54.0. If you don't have Boost installed on your system, you can download it for free from 'http://www.boost.org'.
Additionally, for maximum performance Blaze expects you to have a BLAS library installed (Intel MKL, ACML, Atlas, Goto, ...). If you don't have a BLAS library installed on your system, Blaze will still work and will not be reduced in functionality, but performance may be severely limited. Thus it is strongly recommended to install a BLAS library.
The first step is to adapt the Configfile
in the Blaze home directory to the local configuration. Any text editor can be used for this task:
In the Configfile
, the kind of installation (debug or release), the library types (static and/or dynamic), the compiler including compiler flags, and several include paths have to be specified. Afterwards, the configure
script can be run, which uses the Configfile
to update and create several files:
This step can also be omitted, but results in a default configuration that does not guarantee the highest performance for all operations. For instance, without running the configure
script, Blaze assumes that no BLAS library is installed on the system and cannot use BLAS functionality for instance for the matrix/matrix multiplication.
In order to further customize the Blaze library the header files in the ./blaze/config/ subdirectory can be adapted. See section Configuration Files for more details.
Unfortunately, for Windows users there is no configure
script available (yet). Therefore Windows user have to manually configure the Blaze library. Most configuration headers are located in the ./blaze/config/ subdirectory. The one exception is the BLAS.h
header in the ./blaze/system/ subdirectory that contains the configuration of the BLAS functionality. Note that in case the BLAZE_BLAS_MODE
symbol is set to 1, the correct BLAS header file has to be specified!
The second step is the installation of the header files. Since Blaze mainly consists of header files, the ./blaze subdirectory can be simply copied to a standard include directory (note that this requires root privileges):
Alternatively, on Unix-based machines (which includes Linux and Mac OS X) the CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH
environment variable can be set. The specified directory will be searched after any directories specified on the command line with the option -I
and before the standard default directories (such as /usr/local/include
and /usr/include
). Assuming a user misterX, the environment variable can be set as follows:
Last but not least, the ./blaze subdirectory can be explicitly specified on the command line. The following example demonstrates this by means of the GNU C++ compiler:
Windows doesn't have a standard include directory. Therefore the Blaze header files can be copied to any other directory or simply left in the default Blaze directory. However, the chosen include directory has to be explicitly specified as include path. In Visual Studio, this is done via the project property pages, configuration properties, C/C++, General settings. Here the additional include directories can be specified. Note that there are small differences between VS2008 and VS2010: VC++ Directories.
Next to the math library, Blaze also contains a small number of additional (sub-)libraries. If these libraries, such as the blaze::logging functionality, are required it is necessary to create the Blaze library files. For that purpose, the configure
script has created a Makefile
that can be used for the compilation process:
Afterwards, the libblaze.so
and/or libblaze.a
libraries are contained in the lib subdirectory and can be copied to a standard library directory (note that this requires root privilages). However, this step can be omitted if only the Blaze math library is required.
Alternatively, on Unix-based systems the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable can be extended to also consider the Blaze lib directory:
For Windows users, a comfortable compilation of the extended Blaze features is not (yet) supported.