Swift/T is an implicitly parallel programming language for composing functions and command-line executables into massively parallel applications.

The Swift/T user guide and prepackaged distributions are available online at the Swift/T homepage: http://swift-lang.org/Swift-T/. We recommend that you start there if you are new to Swift or Swift/T.

You can also find the user guide and other documentation for Swift/T in the stc sub-project under docs. See Documentation section for instructions on building.

Prerequisites

Tcl8.6, including developer tools. You need to have tclConfig.sh present in a lib or lib64 directory of your Tcl installation

E.g. to install on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install tcl8.6 tcl8.6-dev

An implementation of MPI compatible with MPI 2 or greater is required. MPI 3.0 or greater compatibility is recommended. If you are installing on a cluster or other system, you can configure Swift/T to be built with that version of MPI. If you are installing on another style of system without MPI preinstalled, the recommended way way to get an up-to-date version of MPI is to general way to to build MPICH from source, for which we provide an automated script, as described in a later section. Your system may supply a prepackaged distribution, e.g. the mpich2 and libmpich2-dev packages on Ubuntu. Swift/T will generally work fine with these, but many distributions are slow to update their MPI package.

Swift/T Quick Build Instructions

These quick build instructions assume you have tcl8.6 or greater and an MPI distribution that supports the MPI 2 or MPI 3.0 standards. This section does not cover all supported systems: if you encounter a problem, refer to the Swift/T user guide.

Checkout this project:

git clone https://github.com/swift-lang/swift-t.git swift-t
cd swift-t

Create a build settings file:

./dev/build/init-settings.sh

Open dev/build/exm-settings.sh in a text editor to update any settings You should update these settings at a minimum to set install and source locations:

EXM_PREFIX=/path/to/install
EXM_SRC_ROOT="${SCRIPT_DIR}/../.."

If you using an MPI 2.x but not MPI 3.0 compatible distribution, you will need to set:

MPI_VERSION=2

You can build with this command:

./dev/build/build-all.sh

The build script is often able to locate all dependencies without further explicit configuration. If you encounter an error while building, or want to ensure that a specific version is used, you can modify configuration, for example to explicitly set the location of Tcl or MPI.

Note: You might need to install zsh for a successful build. Just type sudo apt-get install zsh.

After this initial build, you can do a quick build and install of all components using the fast build script:

./dev/build/fast-build-all.sh

For more information on the build system, see the later section on build system details.

MPICH3 Quick Build Instructions

Uncomment the MPI_INSTALL setting in exm-settings.sh:

MPI_INSTALL=${EXM_PREFIX}/mpi

Download and extract the mpich3 source distribution from: http://www.mpich.org/downloads/ e.g.

wget http://www.mpich.org/static/downloads/3.1/mpich-3.1.tar.gz
tar xvzf mpich-3.1.tar.gz

Change into the source directory, then use the provided build script to configure, compile and install mpich3:

cd mpich-3.1
/path/to/swift-t/dev/build/mpich-build.sh

Build System Details

Swift/T is comprised of several modules, which use two different build systems: autotools/configure/make for C/C++/Fortran modules, and ant for Java modules. You can build the modules separately, but the scripts and configuration files in exm-setting.sh speed up the process and make it easier to consistently configure and build the system. exm-settings.sh controls the build configuration, and build scripts for each module (e.g. turbine-build.sh) build that module from the module's source directory. The two most useful helper scripts are fast-build-all.sh, for quickly rebuilding all modules, and rebuild-all.sh, to do a complete reconfiguration and build, including running autotools.

Documentation

The main documentation for Swift/T is under stc/docs. The documentation is in asciidoc format. You can look at the main documentation in text format in swift.txt. You can also compile the documentation to html by running:

./make-stc-docs.zsh

A sites guide that provides guidance for configuring Swift/T on various systems is at turbine/docs/sites.txt.