Setup

In order to follow this workshop, you will need personal computer for the exercises. This means that you should access to C and Fortran compilers in your computer.

You can use an HPC cluster if you have access to one, but the installation instructions described below cover how to install C and Fortran compilers in your own computer.

The GCC compiler (GNU Compiler Collection) is a collection of compilers and libraries capable of compiling programs written in C, C++, GO, Fortran, and Objective-C programming languages. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The detailed installation procedures in Linux OS, MacOS and Windows OS are listed below.

Note that it is unlikely that the perf utility which is used in the course will work correctly under Windows. In that case, you can always use time to measure execution time, but it will not give data collected by the hardware performance counters.

For Linux users

Both C and Fortran compilers are usually installed in Linux and Unix OS. Just in case there is neither C nor Fortran compilers in your computer, you can follow the instructions HERE to install the GCC compiler.

For Mac users

The suggestion is to install Homebrew, a package manager, on Mac and, from there, install GCC as it can be seen in this guide HERE and replicated below.

  • Install Homebrew

    • Open the terminal on your mac computer

    • Copy/paste and run the command at the terminal /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

    • Wait for the command to finish. If you are prompted to enter a password, please type your mac user’s login password.

    • Copy/paste and run the command to make brew command available inside the terminal echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> ~/.zprofile

  • After Homebrew installs, type brew install gcc in the terminal

  • Once the installation completes, you can check the installed compilers via the commands

    • gcc --version

    • which gfortran

clang and gcc

There are a few things you need to consider when using MacOS:

  • When checking the version of gcc through the command above, in many cases you might see that it is Apple’s version of clang (another compiler) being used instead. If that happens, check the``/usr/local/bin`` directory and look for the direct command to start gcc, usually in the syntax of gcc-<version>, such as gcc-14.

  • We often use time -p to measure performance of certain codes; however, it might be the case that your terminal returns the -p flag as command not found. If that happens, you should run command time -p <executable>.

For Windows users

There are three options to install GCC compilers in your Windows computer.

#. The most recommended option is to install and use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, preferably with Debian or Ubuntu distributions. The detailed guidelines are HERE.

#. You can install the MinGW Utility in your computer. The detailed guidelines are HERE.

#. You can install Cygwin, which gives us a Unix-like environment running on Windows. Then follow steps at HERE to install GCC compilers.