Spack installation of OpenFOAM does not install utility and solver programs

Question

I am installing OpenFOAM with spack. The Spack is configured as follows:

cat << EOF >> $SPACK_ROOT/etc/spack/packages.yaml
packages:
    slurm:
        externals:
        - spec: [email protected]
          prefix: /usr
        buildable: False
    libevent:
        externals:
        - spec: [email protected]
          prefix: /usr
        buildable: False
    pmix:
        externals:
        - spec: [email protected] 
          prefix: /usr
        buildable: False
    hwloc:
        externals:
        - spec: [email protected]
          prefix: /usr
        buildable: False
EOF

The available variants for OpenFOAM reported by Spack are:

# spack list openfoam
...
Variants:
    Name [Default]            When    Allowed values    Description
    ======================    ====    ==============    ==================================================

    build_system [generic]    --      generic           Build systems supported by the package
    int64 [off]               --      on, off           With 64-bit labels
    kahip [off]               --      on, off           With kahip decomposition
    knl [off]                 --      on, off           Use KNL compiler settings
    metis [off]               --      on, off           With metis decomposition
    mgridgen [off]            --      on, off           With mgridgen support
    paraview [off]            --      on, off           Build paraview plugins and runtime post-processing
    precision [dp]            --      sp, dp, spdp      Precision option
    scotch [on]               --      on, off           With scotch/ptscotch decomposition
    source [on]               --      on, off           Install library/application sources and tutorials
    vtk [off]                 --      on, off           With VTK runTimePostProcessing
    zoltan [off]              --      on, off           With zoltan renumbering
...

The compilation is performed with the commands:

spack install -j [email protected] +pmi schedulers=slurm ^[email protected] ^[email protected]
spack install -j openfoam +metis +scotch +zoltan +kahip +mgridgen ^[email protected] 

After the installation I load the OpenFOAM package,

spack load openfoam

and I follow the instructions in the doc/Build.md file of the source code to test the installation:

# Create the user "run" directory:
mkdir -p "$FOAM_RUN"
# Change to the user "run" directory:
run
# Copy tutorial
cp -r "$FOAM_TUTORIALS"/incompressible/simpleFoam/pitzDaily ./
# Run the tutorial
( cd pitzDaily && blockMesh && simpleFoam )

However, there is no simpleFoam solver installed. A search reveals that the code for the simpleFoam solver is present, but no executable is generated:

# find $(spack location -i openfoam) -name simpleFoam
/mnt/irisgpfs/users/gkafanas/.spack/opt/spack/linux-rhel8-zen/gcc-8.5.0/openfoam-2306-ytaggtrqximxwyjmh6b77mw4j66leaxn/tutorials/basic/simpleFoam
/mnt/irisgpfs/users/gkafanas/.spack/opt/spack/linux-rhel8-zen/gcc-8.5.0/openfoam-2306-ytaggtrqximxwyjmh6b77mw4j66leaxn/tutorials/incompressible/simpleFoam
/mnt/irisgpfs/users/gkafanas/.spack/opt/spack/linux-rhel8-zen/gcc-8.5.0/openfoam-2306-ytaggtrqximxwyjmh6b77mw4j66leaxn/etc/caseDicts/createZeroDirectoryTemplates/solvers/simpleFoam
/mnt/irisgpfs/users/gkafanas/.spack/opt/spack/linux-rhel8-zen/gcc-8.5.0/openfoam-2306-ytaggtrqximxwyjmh6b77mw4j66leaxn/applications/solvers/incompressible/simpleFoam

A more detailed search reveals that multiple utility (applications/utilities/) and solver (applications/solvers/) executables are not installed.

Is it possible to compile and load all the utility and solver executables with Spack? Does it require any extra configuration?

Answer 1

The trick may be to disable METIS and ParaView, see below.

We have several SPACK/OpenFOAM versions on different Linux distributions (with a very similar packages.yaml):

CentOS 7 (manually compiled GCC 10.3.0)

SPACK 0.17.1 openfoam@2112%[email protected]~float32~int64~kahip~knl~metis~mgridgen~paraview+scotch+source~spdp~vtk~zoltan

SPACK 0.19.0 openfoam@2212%[email protected]~float32~int64~kahip~knl~metis~mgridgen~paraview+scotch+source~spdp~vtk~zoltan build_system=generic

Ubuntu focal (system GCC 9.3.0):

SPACK 0.19.0 openfoam@2106%[email protected]~float32~int64~kahip~knl~metis~mgridgen~paraview+scotch+source~spdp~vtk~zoltan build_system=generic

I did not have success compiling OpenFOAM with METIS support (yet) and so far I have trouble compiling ParaView from SPACK, so these is disabled. ParaView is installed from system or upstream binaries.

The following should work:

spack install openfoam@2212 ~float32~int64~kahip~knl~metis~mgridgen~paraview+scotch+source~spdp~vtk~zoltan ^[email protected]

SPACK can be a little bit temperamental depending on Linux distribution and compiler (and installed system packages).