What is ALPS Project?

The ALPS project (Algorithms and Libraries for Physics Simulations) is an open source effort aiming at providing high-end simulation codes for strongly correlated quantum mechanical systems as well as C++ libraries for simplifying the development of such code. ALPS strives to increase software reuse in the physics community.

Good information on installing ALPS can be found on ALPS Wiki’s Download and install ALPS for Ubuntu 9.10, Ubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu 10.10, Debian and MacOS

Installing ALPS with Boost

# wget http://alps.comp-phys.org/static/software/releases/alps-2.0.2-r5790-src-with-boost.tar.gz

You will need either gfortran or Intel Fortran Compiler. If you are installing using gfortan

# yum install gcc-c++ gcc-gfortran

If you want to use the evaluation tools, you will need to install a newer version of Python than the provided 2.4. You can install from source or use an unofficial repository for binary RPMs. This is not required if you just want to run your compiled simulations (c++ applications), but make sure you still have python headers (specify -DALPS_BUILD_PYTHON=OFF when invoking cmake):

# yum install python-devel

BLAS/LAPACK is necessary. Make sure you have EPEL repository ready. For more information,Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS Linux Enable EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) Repository

# yum install blas-devel lapack-devel

CMake 2.8.0 and HDF5 1.8 need to be installed. There is a wonderful scripts that comes with ALPS that help to compile CMAKE 2.8 and HDF5.1.8 with CentOS 5

$ $HOME/src/alps2/script/cmake.sh $HOME/opt $HOME/tmp
$ $HOME/src/alps2/script/hdf5.sh $HOME/opt $HOME/tmp

Build ALPS

Create a build directory (anywhere you have write access) and execute cmake giving the path to the alps and to the boost directory:

# cmake -D Boost_ROOT_DIR:PATH=/path/to/boost/directory /path/to/alps/directory

For example if the alps precompiled directory is in /root/alps-2.0.2

# cmake -D Boost_ROOT_DIR:PATH=/root/alps-2.0.2/boost /root/alps-2.0.2/alps

To install in another directory, set set the variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX

# cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/directory /path/to/alps/directory

For example:

# cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/alps-2.0.2 /root/alps-2.0.2/alps

Build and test ALPS

$ make -j 8
$ make test
$ make install

* HDF5.1.8 binaries and  libraries are very useful not only for compiling ALPS but other applications require HDF5.1.8. You may want to consider to move its binaries and libraries to the /usr/local/ directories