spinnaker_tools contains all the requirements for building C binaries for execution on SpiNNaker, as well as the SpiNNaker boot and monitor processor code. This includes:

• SC&MP, the SpiNNaker low-level boot and monitor process.
• SARK, the SpiNNaker low-level C library.
• Spin1 API, the SpiNNaker low-level hardware abstraction API.
• ybug, for low-level execution of binaries and debugging.
• tools and Makefiles, for constructing executables to be run on SpiNNaker.

Installation

1. Install Development Dependencies
2. Install Spinnaker Tools

Once you’ve got a working development environment:

• spinnaker_tools Build System Usage
• Compiling simple, one-off, single-C-file applications
• Creating a Makefile for SpiNNaker C projects

SpiNNakerTools Installation

1. Download the current version of SpiNNaker Tools from here
2. Extract the archive to the location of your choice.
3. Create an environment variable SPINN_DIRS that points at the location of the extracted archive (note that in Windows, this should be the MinGW Posix path e.g. if you have extracted the archive to C:\spinnaker_tools\, you should set the environment variable to /c/spinnaker_tools).
4. Add the tools folder in the extracted archive to your PATH environment variable. This does not need to be a POSIX path on Windows e.g. C:\spinnaker_tools\tools is fine on Windows, or /spinnaker_tools/tools on Linux or Mac.
5. Add the extracted tools folder to your PERL5LIB environment variable (or create this environment variable if it is not already set; note that in Windows, this should be the MinGW Posix path, e.g., if you have extracted the archive to C:\spinnaker_tools\, you should set the environment variable to /c/spinnaker_tools/tools).
6. Run make in the root directory of the extracted archive.

Build System Usage

When using the makefiles supplied in this repository, you must set up a number of environment variables using:

$ cd spinnaker_tools  # You must be in the spinnaker_tools directory!
$ source setup

You should also ensure you have compiled the SpiNNaker libraries as described above otherwise application compilation will fail.

Basic Application Compilation

To quickly compile a simple single-file application for SpiNNaker, you can use the following command:

$ make -f $SPINN_DIRS/make/app.make APP=example

This will compile the application in example.c and produce a SpiNNaker binary called example.aplx in the current directory.

Example Makefile

Though the above is suitable while prototyping applications, real-world applications may contain many source files and should be compiled using their own makefile. A number of example applications are provided in the apps folder to show you how this is done.