Configuring SWIFT with VELOCIraptor

In the following three paragraphs we will explain how to setup VELOCIraptor, how to compile it and how to compile SWIFT with VELOCIraptor.

Setting up VELOCIraptor

Before we can run SWIFT with VELOCIraptor we first need to download VELOCIraptor. This can be done by cloning the repository on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/pelahi/VELOCIraptor-STF

Currently the best version that works with SWIFT is the master of VELOCIraptor, to get this branch use:

cd VELOCIraptor-STF
git fetch

To get VELOCIraptor working with SWIFT simply use:

cmake . -DVR_USE_SWIFT_INTERFACE=ON -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-fPIC" -DVR_USE_GAS=ON

If you wish to run swift without MPI, you will need to add -DVR_MPI=OFF.

Compiling VELOCIraptor

After we downloaded the files and made a configuration file we can compile VELOCIraptor as follows:

make -j 4

After the compilation of your code, you will find a static library libvelociraptor.a, that is required to run SWIFT with VELOCIraptor. Note that VELOCIraptor needs a serial version of the HDF5 library, not a parallel build.

Compiling SWIFT

The next part is compiling SWIFT with VELOCIraptor and assumes you already downloaded SWIFT from the GitLab, this can be done by running

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-velociraptor=/path/to/VELOCIraptor-STF/src
make

In which ./autogen.sh only needs to be run once after the code is cloned from the GitLab, and /path/to/ is the path to the VELOCIraptor-STF directory on your machine. In general ./configure can be run with other options as desired. After this we can run SWIFT with VELOCIraptor, but for this we first need to add several lines to the yaml file of our simulation

StructureFinding:
  config_file_name:     stf_input_6dfof_dmonly_sub.cfg
  basename:             ./stf
  scale_factor_first:   0.02
  delta_time:           1.02

In which we specify the .cfg file that is used by VELOCIraptor and the other parameters which SWIFT needs to use. In the case of the Small Cosmological Volume DMO example we can run a simulation with halo finder as:

cd examples/SmallCosmoVolume_DM
../swift --cosmology --hydro --self-gravity --velociraptor --threads=8 small_cosmo_volume_dm.yml

Which activates the VELOCIraptor interface.