This is a perfect successful installation of SIESTA in parallel version. Working on my VMWareWorkStation Pro 15.5 Ubuntu 19.

0. Purpose

This document contains step-by-step instructions to proceed with a (hopefully) successful installation of the SIESTA (Spanish Initiative for Electronic Simulations with Thousands of Atoms) software on Linux (tested with Ubuntu 18.04) using the GCC and OpenMPI tools for parallelism.

To achieve a parallel build of SIESTA you should first determine which type of parallelism you need. It is advised to use MPI for calculations with a moderate number of cores. For hundreds of threads, hybrid parallelism using both MPI and OpenMP may be required.

1. Install prerequisite software

Note: We assume you are running all the commands below as an ordinary user (non-root), so we use sudo when required. That's because mpirun does NOT like to be executed as root.

sudo apt install build-essential g++ gfortran libreadline-dev m4 xsltproc -y

Now install OpenMPI or MPICH software and libraries:

sudo apt install openmpi-common openmpi-bin libopenmpi-dev -y

OR, if you prefer, install mpich implementation of MPI:

sudo apt install mpich libcr-dev -y

Do NOT install both packages (OpenMPI and MPICH).

2. Create required installation folders

SIESTA_DIR=/opt/siesta
OPENBLAS_DIR=/opt/openblas
SCALAPACK_DIR=/opt/scalapack 

sudo mkdir $SIESTA_DIR $OPENBLAS_DIR $SCALAPACK_DIR
# temporally loose permissions (we will revert later)
sudo chmod -R 777 $SIESTA_DIR $OPENBLAS_DIR $SCALAPACK_DIR

3. Install prerequisite libraries

In order to run siesta in parallel using MPI you need non-threaded blas and lapack libraries along with a standard scalapack library.

3.1. Install single-threaded openblas library from source

Note: apt installs a threaded version of openblas by default, I think this is not suitable for this MPI build of siesta.

cd $OPENBLAS_DIR
wget -O OpenBLAS.tar.gz https://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/openblas/v0.3.7/OpenBLAS%200.3.7%20version.tar.gz
tar xzf OpenBLAS.tar.gz && rm OpenBLAS.tar.gz
cd "$(find . -type d -name xianyi-OpenBLAS*)"
make DYNAMIC_ARCH=0 CC=gcc FC=gfortran HOSTCC=gcc BINARY=64 INTERFACE=64 \
  NO_AFFINITY=1 NO_WARMUP=1 USE_OPENMP=0 USE_THREAD=0 USE_LOCKING=1 LIBNAMESUFFIX=nonthreaded
make PREFIX=$OPENBLAS_DIR LIBNAMESUFFIX=nonthreaded install
cd $OPENBLAS_DIR && rm -rf "$(find $OPENBLAS_DIR -maxdepth 1 -type d -name xianyi-OpenBLAS*)"

3.2. Install scalapack from source

mpiincdir="/usr/include/mpich"
if [ ! -d "$mpiincdir" ]; then mpiincdir="/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openmpi/include" ; fi
cd $SCALAPACK_DIR
wget http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/scalapack_installer.tgz -O ./scalapack_installer.tgz
tar xf ./scalapack_installer.tgz
mkdir -p $SCALAPACK_DIR/scalapack_installer/build/download/
wget https://github.com/Reference-ScaLAPACK/scalapack/archive/v2.1.0.tar.gz -O $SCALAPACK_DIR/scalapack_installer/build/download/scalapack.tgz
cd ./scalapack_installer
./setup.py --prefix $SCALAPACK_DIR --blaslib=$OPENBLAS_DIR/lib/libopenblas_nonthreaded.a \
  --lapacklib=$OPENBLAS_DIR/lib/libopenblas_nonthreaded.a --mpibindir=/usr/bin --mpiincdir=$mpiincdir

Note: Answer 'b' if asked: 'Which BLAS library do you want to use ?'

4. Install siesta from source

cd $SIESTA_DIR
wget https://launchpad.net/siesta/4.1/4.1-b3/+download/siesta-4.1-b3.tar.gz
tar xzf ./siesta-4.1-b3.tar.gz && rm ./siesta-4.1-b3.tar.gz

4.1. Install siesta library dependencies from source

Install the fortran-lua-hook library (flook):

cd $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Docs
wget https://github.com/ElectronicStructureLibrary/flook/releases/download/v0.7.0/flook-0.7.0.tar.gz
(./install_flook.bash 2>&1) | tee install_flook.log

Install netcdf dependency (required and slow, grab a coffee):

cd $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Docs
wget https://zlib.net/zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz
wget https://support.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/releases/hdf5-1.8/hdf5-1.8.18/src/hdf5-1.8.18.tar.bz2
wget -O netcdf-c-4.4.1.1.tar.gz https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/archive/v4.4.1.1.tar.gz
wget -O netcdf-fortran-4.4.4.tar.gz https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-fortran/archive/v4.4.4.tar.gz
(./install_netcdf4.bash 2>&1) | tee install_netcdf4.log

If anything goes wrong in this step you can check the install_netcdf4.log log file.

4.2. Download our custom 'arch.make' file for GCC + OpenMPI/MPICH build

cd $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Obj
wget -O arch.make https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bgeneto/siesta-gcc-mpi/master/gcc-mpi-arch.make

4.3. Build siesta executable

cd $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Obj
sh ../Src/obj_setup.sh
make OBJDIR=Obj

5. Revert to default permissions and ownership

Just in case...

sudo chown -R root:root $SIESTA_DIR $OPENBLAS_DIR $SCALAPACK_DIR
sudo chmod -R 755 $SIESTA_DIR $OPENBLAS_DIR $SCALAPACK_DIR

6. Test siesta

Let's copy siesta Test directory to our home (where we have all necessary permissions):

mkdir -p $HOME/siesta/siesta-4.1-b3
rsync -a $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Tests/ $HOME/siesta/siesta-4.1-b3/Tests/

Now create a symbolic link to siesta executable

cd $HOME/siesta/siesta-4.1-b3
ln -s $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Obj/siesta

Finally run some test job:

cd $HOME/siesta/siesta-4.1-b3/Tests/h2o_dos/
make

We should see the following message:

===> SIESTA finished successfully

7. Create a symbolic link for every user

SIESTA_DIR=/opt/siesta
for USER in $(ls /home)
do
    if [ "$USER" == "lost+found" ]
    then
        continue
    else
        sudo -u $USER mkdir /home/$USER/bin
        sudo -u $USER ln -sf $SIESTA_DIR/siesta-4.1-b3/Obj/siesta /home/$USER/bin/siesta
    fi
done

8. Learning to use siesta

Read the manual.