Installing FVCOM

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This page describes the installation and execution of FVCOM on your system. FVCOM has been successfully ported to a wide range of environments. The preferred environment is Linux. A niche group have successfully used OS X on 10.4-10.7. Windows installation is possible but senseless.

Contents

Recommended Environment

Users have built FVCOM with gcc/ifort, icc/ifort, pgcc/pgf90, xlc/xlf90, gcc/gfortran with the majority of the users using gcc/ifort. While we are hopeful that an all gnu solution (gcc/gfortran) will become more popular, at present the gfortran compiler underperforms intel on intel systems.


Windows Users

It is recommended that you download and install the latest version of cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com). Cygwin is a bash shell/Unix emulation program and contains many of the tools such as tar, gzip/gunzip, and cpp which will be useful for installation and compilation of FVCOM. Also, cygwin gives Windows a decent interface with which to setup and run the model. Note that it requires basic familiarity with Unix commands.


Acquiring FVCOM

FVCOM can be obtained from the FVCOM community website through the code repository portal. Note that this section of the website is password protected. Usernames and passwords will be provided after the user agreement form has been signed. Once in the repository, read the package definitions and choose the appropriate version for your research needs. Download the gzipped tar file directly to your computer. This tar file will contain the source code, a makefile, and the test problems described NEEDLINK.

Extracting the tarfile

Extract the tarfile (FVCOM***.tgz) with the following command:

gunzip –c FVCOMxxx | tar xvf -

This will produce the top level directory: FVCOMxxx where xxx indicates the version number.

FVCOM directory structure
FVCOM directory structure

Compiling METIS

This is only necessary for users intending to use the explicit MPI parallelization. The METIS graph partitioning libraries are used to perform the domain decomposition portion of the FVCOM parallelization. These library routines are coded in the c language and must be compiled separately from the main coding. To compile the libraries, edit the makefile in the METIS source directory to point to your c compiler. It is advisable to use a c compiler from the same vendor as your intended Fortran compiler. In addition, make sure you are compiling the libraries using the same architecture (currently 32 or 64 bit) This will help avoid compatibility problems when linking the libraries and the FVCOM code. To compile the libraries, use “make”. A successful build will produce the file libmetis.a which will be linked during the FVCOM build. Note that if you do not intend to use FVCOM in a multiprocessor environment, it is not necessary to build these libraries.

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