2.1 System requirements

You should verify that you have the following:

A copy of the FLASH source code distribution (as a Unix tar file). To request a copy of the distribution, click on the “Code Request” link on the FLASH Center web site. You will be asked to fill out a short form before receiving download instructions. Please remember the username and password you use to download the code; you will need these to get bug fixes and updates to FLASH.
A F90 (Fortran 90) compiler and a C compiler. Most of FLASH is written in F90. Information available at the Fortran Company web site can help you select an F90 compiler for your system. FLASH has been tested with many Fortran compilers. For details of compilers and libraries, see the RELEASE-NOTES available in the FLASH home directory.
An installed copy of the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) library. A freely available implementation of MPI called MPICH is available from Argonne National Laboratory.
To use the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) for output files, you will need an installed copy of the freely available HDF library. The serial version of HDF5 is the current default FLASH format. HDF5 is available from the HDF Group (http://www.hdfgroup.org/) of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu. The contents of HDF5 output files produced by the FLASH units are described in detail in Sec:FLASH output formats.
To use the Parallel NetCDF format for output files, you will need an installed copy of the freely available PnetCDF library. PnetCDF is available from Argonne National Lab at
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/parallel-netcdf/. For details of this format, see Sec:FLASH output formats.
To use Chombo as the (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) AMR option, you will need an installed copy of the library, available freely from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab at https://seesar.lbl.gov/anag/chombo. The use of Chombo is described in Sec:chombo
To use the Diffuse unit with HYPRE solvers, you will need to have an installed copy of HYPRE, available for free from Lawrence Livermore National Lab at
https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/hypre/software.html. Versions of HYPRE from 2.7.0b to 2.13 should all work with FLASH4.5.
HYPRE is required for using several critical HEDP capabilities including multigroup radiation diffusion and thermal conduction. Please make sure you have HYPRE installed if you want these capabilities.
To use the output analysis tools described in this section, you will need a copy of the IDL language from ITT Visual Information Solutions. IDL is a commercial product. It is not required for the analysis of FLASH output, but the fidlr3.0 tools described in this section require it. (FLASH output formats are described in Sec:Output formats. If IDL is not available, another visual analysis option is ViSit, described in Sec:visit.) The newest IDL routines, those contained in fidlr3.0, were written and tested with IDL 6.1 and above. You are encouraged to upgrade if you are using an earlier version. Also, to use the HDF5 version 1.6.2, analysis tools included in IDL require IDL 6.1 and above. New versions of IDL come out frequently, and sometimes break backwards compatibility, but every effort will be made to support them.
The GNU make utility, gmake. This utility is freely available and has been ported to a wide variety of different systems. For more information, see the entry for make in the development software listing at http://www.gnu.org/. On some systems make is an alias for gmake. GNU make is required because FLASH uses macro concatenation when constructing Makefiles.
A copy of the Python language, version 2.2 or later is required to run the setup script. Python can be downloaded from http://www.python.org.