Building the dependencies (Ubuntu 24.04)

These are the exact steps used to build SDPB and the Python extension on a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 machine.

1. System packages

sudo apt-get install -y openmpi-bin libopenmpi-dev libgmp-dev libmpfr-dev \
    libboost-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-serialization-dev \
    libboost-stacktrace-dev libopenblas-dev rapidjson-dev \
    libmetis-dev libflint-dev pkg-config cmake g++

FLINT 3.0.1 from apt satisfies SDPB’s minimum (2.8.0), so it is not built from source.

This is what the Python extension needs. SDPB’s command-line tools and its own test-suite (section 4) additionally need libboost-all-dev libxml2-dev libarchive-dev bison flex and MPSolve; none of that is used by the package.

2. Elemental (bootstrap-collaboration fork), installed to ~/install

git clone --depth=1 https://gitlab.com/bootstrapcollaboration/elemental.git
mkdir elemental/build && cd elemental/build
CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j4 && make install

3. SDPB and the Python package

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:YPWang0818/sdpb-python.git
cd sdpb-python
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install setuptools wheel Cython mpmath pytest
scripts/build_sdpb.sh

The submodule c-src/sdpb follows the fork’s python-api branch (a few patches over upstream master, see API_DESIGN.md §6).

The script configures waf with --libs-only (only the four static libraries the extension links: no tools, no MPSolve, libxml2 or libarchive) and CXXFLAGS=-fPIC (required to link them into a Python shared object), builds them, then runs pip install -e ..

4. Tests

The Python package tests:

pytest

SDPB’s own suite is only of interest when changing the fork. It needs the full SDPB build, hence the extra packages named in section 1 and MPSolve under ~/install. The test script expects it in build/, which the package’s --libs-only build also uses, so rebuild the latter afterwards (unit tests need 6 MPI ranks, integration tests take ~8 min):

cd c-src/sdpb
CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx CXXFLAGS=-fPIC python3 ./waf configure \
    --elemental-dir=$HOME/install --mpsolve-dir=$HOME/install
python3 ./waf build && ./test/run_all_tests.sh
cd ../.. && scripts/rebuild.sh --force    # back to the --libs-only build

Notes

• If DISPLAY is set without X authorisation, MPI programs print “Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified” on stderr. It is harmless; unset DISPLAY silences it.

• The integration test pmp2sdp / filesystem errors / invalid_nsv has been seen to fail intermittently because the captured stderr of an aborted MPI run came back empty. Rerunning it passes.

• OpenBLAS selects its kernels at run time from the CPU family, and for an AMD family-15/17 CPU it takes Opteron kernels that use the 3DNow! instruction femms. QEMU/KVM guests with the default CPU model report such a family without 3DNow!, so the first solve() died with Illegal instruction inside libopenblas (wheel builds before this fix and source builds against a system OpenBLAS alike). The package now sets OPENBLAS_CORETYPE itself on such CPUs before OpenBLAS loads (module sdpb_python._cpu; an existing setting is kept), and the wheels’ OpenBLAS is built without the Opteron targets. On a source build, OPENBLAS_CORETYPE=NEHALEM in the environment is the manual equivalent.