lhapdf – Hepforge

Configuration options

The standard sequence of commands for building and installing lhapdf are:

tar -xzf lhapdf-5.x.x.tar.gz
cd lhapdf-5.x.x
configure
make
make install

This will get you the complete LHAPDF build installed into the default location which is /usr/local.

The 'configure' command, however, has various options which can be used to tailor the building process to your own requirements.
To see a full list of configure options type 'configure --help'

Below are the most signficant which you might wish to use

--prefix=/install/directory Selects the directory path into which 'make install' installs the compiled lhapdf libraries and programs.

--enable-low-memory This limits the number of members of a PDF set which are intialised to '1', instead of all of the members of the set. This clearly has a big impact on efficiency if using multiple members of a set, but can be used to cut down memory usage if only one member of a set is needed.

--with-max-num-pdfsets=n This sets the maximum number of PDF sets which can be initialized at the same time to 'n' (the default is '3').

--enable-pdfsets=LIST Available from v 5.8.0 onwards.
LIST is a comma separated list of pdf sets. The effect is to only build the libraries with the code necessary for these pdf sets. The table below shows the reported virtrual memory usage (on a 32 bit Linux system) with the different PDF sets. Specifying a negative value for a PDF sets means exclude that set. It is clearly meaningless to have both negative and postivie (unsigned) values in a list but in this case the negative values take precedence and the 'positive' values in the list are then ignored.

'all' (the default) includes all PDF sets.
'mrst' gives all the MRST sets except the 2006 nnlo sets,the 2004 QED set and the early 1998 sets.

pdfset	default build	--enable-low-memory --with-max-num-pdfsets=1	--enable-low-memory	--with-max-num-pdfsets=1
	Vitrual memory size in mBytes
all	1550	107	151	887
mrst	206	40	53	91
mrst06	104	5	7	?
mrst98	49	39	49	39
mrstqed	181	4	9	61
mstw	557	7	17	186
cteq	86	8	21	30
grv	4	2	4	2
nnpdf	328	30	31	327
gjr	25	3	4	23
h1	8	2	3	7
zeus	48	39	48	40
hera	94	57	72	79
alekhin	59	39	49	39
botje	48	39	48	39
fermi	48	39	48	39
hkn	20	3	4	3
pions	3	2	3	2
photons	3	2	3	2