Installing Nebula

Requirements

Nebula needs the following software to be available:

  • cmake 3.8 or greater
  • hdf5 1.8.13 or greater, including the high-level libraries
  • Optionally: CUDA 8.0 or greater (to run on GPUs)
  • A C++11-compliant compiler, such as gcc 4.8 or later

Getting Nebula

Via the command line with git installed:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/nebula-simulator/nebula

Alternatively, via a web browser without git installed:

  1. Download the zip file from github.
  2. Download nvidia's cub library, and place it in the 3rdparty/cub/ folder. (So there is a 3rdparty/cub/cub/cub.cuh file).

Compiling Nebula

Start your terminal and go to the folder in which you placed Nebula (at the same level as the 3rdparty and source folders). We're going to compile the simulator in a new folder called build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

This will make a new folder called build in which all temporary build files are written. The final executables are located in build/bin.

The cmake step will attempt to locate the HDF5 libraries and a CUDA compiler. If it complains that the HDF5 library cannot be found, you can provide a location by passing -DHDF5_ROOT=<xxx> to the cmake command. If a CUDA compiler is not found, the build step will not build a GPU version of the simulator.

Making Nebula available

In order to make Nebula available as a command, you need to add it to your PATH environment variable. To do this, add the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/nebula/build/bin

Alternatively, you can perform that command manually every time you start a new terminal session.

You can find /path/to/nebula/ by typing pwd when you are in the Nebula folder.