Building Dakota on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

The developers of Dakota provide binary distributions for Mac OS X and the CentOS (RHEL-compatible) Linux distribution. They don't, however, provide a binary for the Ubuntu (Debian-compatible) Linux distribution, requesting that users compile Dakota from source. This is a long and moderately difficult task, so it may be out of reach for many Dakota users who prefer to use Ubuntu. Additionally, the Travis CI web service that CSDMS uses for integration testing runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, so for us to test our software with Dakota, it would be convenient to have a pre-built binary that can be easily accessed by Travis. These are a set of notes for building Dakota from source on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Build instructions

The Dakota developers provide help for building Dakota from source. In particular, I followed their instructions

• for handling dependencies in Ubuntu 12.04, and for
• configuring, compiling, and installing Dakota,

although, as always, the details are important, so I'll try to be careful in explaining what I did.

Setting up an Ubuntu VM

We don't have an Ubuntu test machine at CSDMS, so I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a VM on my iMac using VirtualBox.

Be sure to provide at least:

• 20 GB of hard disk space
• 2 GB of system memory

I couldn't compile the Boost library until I bumped up the base system memory. Graphics memory and acceleration aren't needed.

Packages

Here are the Ubuntu packages that are both required and are available through the package manager (i.e., they don't need to be built from source):

• libblas-dev
• liblapack-dev
• g++
• gfortran
• fort77
• libteuchos-dev (although this lib optional, it will be built by Dakota unless it's installed)

Install these packages before doing anything else.