Yaksa

Yaksa is a high-performance noncontiguous datatype engine that can be used to express and manipulate noncontiguous data. This release is an experimental version of Yaksa that contains features related to packing/unpacking, I/O vectors, and flattening noncontiguous datatypes.

This README file should contain enough information to get you started with Yaksa. More information about Yaksa can be found at https://github.com/pmodels/yaksa.

1. Getting Started
2. Testing Yaksa
3. Reporting Problems
4. Alternate Configure Options
5. Compiler Flags
6. Developer Builds

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Getting Started

The following instructions take you through a sequence of steps to get the default configuration of Yaksa up and running.

1. You will need the following prerequisites.

   • REQUIRED: This tar file yaksa-.tar.gz

   • REQUIRED: A C compiler (gcc is sufficient)

Also, you need to know what shell you are using since different shell has different command syntax. Command "echo $SHELL" prints out the current shell used by your terminal program.

2. Unpack the tar file and go to the top level directory:

   tar xzf yaksa-.tar.gz cd yaksa-

3. Choose an installation directory, say /home/USERNAME/yaksa-install, which is assumed to be non-existent or empty.

4. Configure Yaksa specifying the installation directory:

   ./configure --prefix=/home/USERNAME/yaksa-install 2>&1 | tee c.txt

5. Build Yaksa:

   make 2>&1 | tee m.txt

This step should succeed if there were no problems with the preceding step. Check file m.txt. If there were problems, do a "make clean" and then run make again with V=1.

make V=1 2>&1 | tee m.txt   (for bash and sh)

Then go to step 3 below, for reporting the issue to the Yaksa developers and other users.

6. Install Yaksa:

   make install 2>&1 | tee mi.txt

This step collects all required executables and scripts in the bin subdirectory of the directory specified by the prefix argument to configure.

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Testing Yaksa

To test Yaksa, we package the Yaksa test suite in the Yaksa distribution. You can run the test suite in the test directory using:

 make testing

If you run into any problems on running the test suite, please follow step 3 below for reporting them to the Yaksa developers and other users.

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Reporting Problems

If you have problems with the installation or usage of Yaksa, please follow these steps:

1. First visit the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page at https://github.com/pmodels/yaksa/wiki/FAQ to see if the problem you are facing has a simple solution.

2. If you cannot find an answer on the FAQ page, look through previous issues filed (https://github.com/pmodels/yaksa/issues). It is likely someone else had a similar problem, which has already been resolved before.

3. If neither of the above steps work, please send an email to [email protected]. You need to subscribe to this list (https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/yaksa-users) before sending an email.

Your email should contain the following files. ONCE AGAIN, PLEASE COMPRESS BEFORE SENDING, AS THE FILES CAN BE LARGE. Note that, depending on which step the build failed, some of the files might not exist.

yaksa-<version>/c.txt (generated in step 4 of ["Getting Started"])
yaksa-<version>/m.txt (generated in step 5 of ["Getting Started"])
yaksa-<version>/mi.txt (generated in step 6 of ["Getting Started"])
yaksa-<version>/config.log (generated in step 4 of ["Getting Started"])

DID WE MENTION? DO NOT FORGET TO COMPRESS THESE FILES!

Finally, please include the actual error you are seeing when running the application. If possible, please try to reproduce the error with a smaller application or benchmark and send that along in your bug report.

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Alternate Configure Options

Yaksa has a number of other features. If you are exploring Yaksa as part of a development project, you might want to tweak the Yaksa build with the following configure options. A complete list of configuration options can be found using:

./configure --help

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Compiler Flags

By default, Yaksa automatically adds certain compiler optimizations to CFLAGS. The currently used optimization level is -O2.

This optimization level can be changed with the --enable-fast option passed to configure. For example, to build Yaksa with -O3, one can simply do:

./configure --enable-fast=O3

Or to disable all compiler optimizations, one can do:

./configure --disable-fast

For more details of --enable-fast, see the output of "./configure --help".

For performance testing, we recommend the following flags:

./configure --enable-fast=O3

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Developer Builds

For Yaksa developers who want to directly work on the primary version control system, there are a few additional steps involved (people using the release tarballs do not have to follow these steps). Details about these steps can be found here: https://github.com/pmodels/yaksa/wiki/Getting-and-Building