Environment

Currently builds under Windows/Mac/Linux using msvc/gcc/clang and nvcc (if CUDA is available) with cmake.

Base dependancies (required for all builds of SCAMP):

  • cmake 3.18 or greater

    • This version is not available directly from all package managers so you may need to install it manually, the easist way to do this is with python via pip install cmake or you can download it manually from here

  • C/C++ compiler (e.g. gcc/clang/Visual Studio Build tools)

  • SCAMP is only tested currently on x86_64 systems. 32-bit systems are not supported. Though SCAMP may build on them, other 64-bit architectures are not currently tested or optimized for.

For GPU support (required for any SCAMP build which will use a GPU):

  • cuda toolkit v11.0 or greater

  • NVIDIA GPU with CUDA (compute capability 3.5+) support.

    • You can find a list of CUDA compatible GPUs here

    • Highly recommend using a Pascal/Volta or newer GPU as they are much better (V100 is ~10x faster than a K80 for SCAMP, V100 is ~2-3x faster than a P100)

For python support:

  • Only Python 3 is supported.

Recommended Compiler:

  • If you are using CPUs, using a newer version of clang is recommended as it tends to have better performance.

Notes on GPU Support

You need to have a cuda development environment set up in order to build SCAMP with GPU support. If you install SCAMP (or pyscamp) and it does not detect CUDA during installation it will install using CPU support only. cmake must detect your cuda installation, this can be especially tricky when using Windows and MSVC as you need to have the CUDA extensions for visual studio installed.

I have only gotten Windows CUDA builds to work under MSVC and the Visual Studio Generators. There are some issues with cmake/nvcc/msvc that make it very difficult to install outside of this configuration.

You can use the configuration option FORCE_CUDA=1, to force SCAMP to build with CUDA (or fail). This works when installing pyscamp as well using FORCE_CUDA=1 pip install pyscamp.