Setting up Dynamatic
There are currently two ways to setup and use Dynamatic
1. Build From Source (Recommended)
We support building from source on Linux and on Windows (through WSL). See our Build instructions below. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is officially supported; other apt-based distributions should work as well. Other distributions may also require cosmetic changes to the dependencies you have to install before running Dynamatic.
2. Use the Provided Virtual Machine
We provide an Ubuntu-based Virtual Machine (VM) that already has Dynamatic and our dataflow circuit visualizer set up. You can use it to simply follow the tutorial (Using Dynamatic) or as a starting point to use/modify Dynamatic in general.
Build Instructions
The following instructions can be used to setup Dynamatic from source.
note
If you intend to modify Dynamatic’s source code and/or build the interactive dataflow circuit visualizer (recommended for circuit debugging), you can check our advanced build instructions to learn how to customize the build process to your needs.
1. Install Dependencies Required by the Project
Most of our dependencies are provided as standard packages on most Linux distributions. Dynamatic needs a working C/C++ toolchain (compiler, linker), cmake and ninja for building the project, Python (3.6 or newer), a recent JDK (Java Development Kit) for Scala, GraphViz to work with .dot files, and standard command-line tools like git.
note
You will need at least 50GB of internal storage to compile the llvm-project and 16GB+ of memory is recommended to facilitate the linking process
On apt-based Linux distributions:
apt-get update
apt-get install clang lld ccache cmake ninja-build python3 openjdk-21-jdk graphviz git curl gzip libreadline-dev libboost-all-dev
Note that you may need super user privileges for any package installation. You can use sudo before entering the commands
clang, lld, and ccache are not strictly required but significantly speed up (re)builds. If you do not wish to install them, call the build script with the –disable-build-opt flag to prevent their usage.
Dynamatic uses RTL generators written in Chisel (a hardware construction language embedded in the high-level programming language Scala) to produce synthesizable RTL designs. You can install Scala using the recommended way with the following command:
curl -fL https://github.com/coursier/coursier/releases/latest/download/cs-x86_64-pc-linux.gz | gzip -d > cs && chmod +x cs && ./cs setup
Dynamatic utilizes Gurobi to optimize the circuit’s performance. It is optional and Dynamatic will build properly without it but is useful for more optimized results. Refer to our Advanced Build page for guidance on how to setup the Gurobi solver.
tip
While this section helps you install the dependencies needed to get started with Dynamatic, you can find a list of dependencies used by Dynamatic in the dependencies section for a better understanding of how the tool works.
Finally, Dynamatic uses Modelsim or Questa to run simulations.
These are optional tools which you can see how to install in the Advanced Build page if you intend to use the simulator.
tip
Before moving on to the next step, refresh your environment variables in your current terminal to make sure that all newly installed tools are visible in your PATH. Alternatively, open a new terminal and proceed to cloning the project.
2. Cloning the Project and Its Submodules
Dynamatic depends on a fork of Polygeist (C/C++ frontend for MLIR), which itself depends on LLVM/MLIR. To instruct git to clone the appropriate versions submodules used by Dynamatic, we enable the --recurse-submodules flag.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/EPFL-LAP/dynamatic.git
This creates a dynamatic folder in your current working directory.
3. Build the Project
Run the build script from the directory created by the clone command (see the advanced build instructions for details on how to customize the build process).
cd dynamatic
chmod +x ./build.sh
./build.sh --release
4. Run the Dynamatic Testsuite
To confirm that you have successfully compiled Dynamatic and to test its functionality, you can run Dynamatic’s testsuite from the top-level build folder using ninja.
# From the "dynamatic" folder created by the clone command
cd build
ninja check-dynamatic
You can now launch the Dynamatic front-end from Dynamatic’s top level directory using:
./bin/dynamatic
With Dynamatic correctly installed, you can browse the using dynamatic tutorial to learn how to use the basic commands and features in Dynamatic to convert your C code into RTL.
You can also explore the Advanced build options.