Installation of WSClean on Red Hat-based systems

This chapter contains some instructions for Red Hat based systems.

CentOS 8

The source repository contains a Docker file in scripts/docker/CentOS/. This is a script to build a WSClean master branch Docker container based on CentOS 8. These same steps can be used as a reference when building WSClean versions on a (non-virtual) CentOS system. Other Red Hat systems should be very similar.

General hints for CentOS / RHEL

FFTW

In case FFTW is built manually, be sure to run the configure call of FFTW with the setting -enable-float. This enables the single-precision floating-point version of FFTW, which is used by WSClean.

HDF5

The HDF5 library needs to be built with support for thread safety. This requires turning on the ‘unsupported’ option during the compilation of hdf5, for example like this:

cd hdf5 && mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DALLOW_UNSUPPORTED=ON -DHDF5_ENABLE_THREADSAFE=ON ../
...

WSClean 2.7 on Red Hat 7.6

The text below was written by Leonardo Saavedra from NRAO.

Note

Be aware that these instructions are not for the latest WSClean version.

Some WSClean dependencies are provided by RHEL 7.6, but you have to install the latest fftw and casacore.

• http://www.fftw.org/

• https://sourceforge.net/p/wsclean

• https://github.com/casacore/casacore

Download the packages

mkdir ~/wsclean
cd wsclean
wget -c http://www.fftw.org/fftw-3.3.8.tar.gz
wget -c https://github.com/casacore/casacore/archive/v3.1.1.tar.gz
wget -c https://sourceforge.net/projects/wsclean/files/wsclean-2.7/wsclean-2.7.tar.bz2

Note

Be aware that these instructions refer to the old SourceForge version of WSClean. It is highly recommended to use newer versions from GitLab.

For this example I am going to install under /export/local

Install fftw

cd ~/wsclean
tar xzvf fftw-3.3.8.tar.gz
cd fftw-3.3.8/
./configure --prefix=/export/local  --enable-threads --enable-openmp  --enable-shared --enable-float
make
make install

Install Casacore

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/export/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
cd ~/wsclean
tar xzvf v3.1.1.tar.gz
cd casacore-3.1.1/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/export/local/
make -j `nproc`
vim cmake_install.cmake <-- modified CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
make install

Install WSClean 2.7

cd ~/wsclean
tar xvfj wsclean-2.7.tar.bz2
cd wsclean-2.7/
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/export/local/
make -j `nproc`
vim cmake_install.cmake <-- modified CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
make install

Check WSClean

pwd
/export/local/bin
./wsclean -version

WSClean version 2.7.0 (2019-04-19)
This software package is released under the GPL version 3.
Author: André Offringa (offringa@gmail.com).