3.6. Building From Source (Bare Metal)

For working on the SimBricks core itself — the protocol libraries, the proxies, or the Python orchestration packages — you build directly from the main repository:

git clone https://github.com/simbricks/simbricks.git
cd simbricks

3.6.1. C/C++ parts

make builds the components contained in the repository: the SimBricks protocol libraries (lib/, producing libsimbricks.a and the per-protocol archives) and the distributed- simulation proxies (dist/sockets/net_sockets; add ENABLE_RDMA=y in mk/local.mk or on the command line to also build dist/rdma/net_rdma, which requires rdma-core).

You need a C/C++ toolchain (gcc/g++), GNU make, and boost. For the authoritative dependency set, consult the conda recipes in conda-recipes/ (simbricks-lib, simbricks-dist) — they are what CI builds with. Alternatively, develop inside the simbricks/simbricks-baseenv container and install the toolchain from conda.

make install-lib / make install-dist install libraries, headers, and proxies to a prefix; see Building the Core Library Debian Package for building a Debian package of the core library instead.

Simulators are not part of this repository: each lives in its own component-* repository and is built there against an installed simbricks-lib (see Packaging a Simulator as a Component Repository).

3.6.2. Python packages (symphony)

The Python packages all live under symphony/. For development, install them editable into your current environment (virtualenv or conda environment, Python >= 3.10):

make symphony-dev

This installs simbricks-utils, simbricks-orchestration, simbricks-runtime, simbricks-client, simbricks-telemetry, simbricks-cli, simbricks-runner, and simbricks-local with pip install -e, so your changes are picked up immediately. Type checking runs with make symphony-typecheck.

3.6.3. Conda packages

The conda recipes for everything in this repository are under conda-recipes/ and build with make conda-packages (requires conda-build; the recipes resolve their dependencies from the public SimBricks channel).

3.6.4. Documentation

The build dependencies of this documentation (sphinx, doxygen, and the SimBricks packages that are autodoc’ed in the reference) are installed as conda packages from doc/environment.yml:

micromamba env create -f doc/environment.yml
micromamba activate simbricks-docs
make documentation

The result lands in doc/_build. The checked-in environment resolves the SimBricks packages from the stable channel — the same channel released documentation is built against on readthedocs. To check how the documentation looks against the upcoming, not-yet-released state, create the environment from the latest channel instead by swapping the channel URL in doc/environment.yml (see the comment there), e.g.:

sed 's|conda.simbricks.io/stable|conda.simbricks.io/latest|' doc/environment.yml \
    | micromamba env create -n simbricks-docs-latest -f /dev/stdin
micromamba activate simbricks-docs-latest
make documentation