About Geneva library

Geneva is an abbreviation and stands for "Grid-ENabled EVolutionary Algorithms".

What it does is described in the librarie's README file:
It aims to provide the necessary tools to perform parametric optimization in parallel on devices ranging from multi-processor machines over clusters all the way to Grids and Cloud installations.

Geneva does not want to be the fastest library of evolutionary algorithms on single-processor machines, but is instead targeted at large scale problems, where the evaluation of a single individual will typically take longer than a few seconds.

Geneva is the flag ship offer of "Gemfony scientific", an initiative led by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, aiming to transfer scientific research into the industry.

Geneva library installation

I want to describe how i made it to set up the Geneva library on a Debian lenny system.

The first step you need to get the Geneva lib into ops is to set up the C++ boost library at least in version 1.36. How to do that is the topic of a dedicated article: Boost setup for Debian lenny.

Next thing to do is to get the Geneva sources. You can either download it with your browser from http://sourceforge.net/projects/genevaopt/ or use svn to get the latest dev version.

svn co https://genevaopt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/genevaopt/trunk genevaopt

Now you need the cmake command in version  2.6-patch 4, which is not shipped with debian lenny. So looking again at Boost setup for Debian lenny. and having tuned the apt setup you can use:

aptitude install cmake/testing

With the patch 4 version of cmake the cmake command proceed. However at this point you have to think about the installation path of the library. Furthermore, in my opinion the install needs a Geneva specific directory, so that the lib is not distributed in your /usr/local or othe directories. So  i did:

cmake /path/to/geneva-top-dir -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/opt/geneva"

Now on my system there was a missing dependency of openbabel, which you can use from the lenny dist:

aptitude install openbabel

Finally you can compile and install the library. Be aware that depending on the destination library path you need to have write permissions to that directory. So lazy as I am I did the following as user "root" ;-):

make
make install

And finally you have a working Geneva library. Howto check, if it is really working there will be a dedicated post! :-)