Obtaining and Installing FAAST

You can download the latest stable release of FAAST from http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~defeo/FAAST/download . It comes as a zipped source distribution named faast-0.2.0.tar.gz or faast-0.2.0.tar.bz2 . No binary distributions are available for the moment.

Requirements

FAAST is built on top of Victor Shoup's NTL, you can download it at http://www.shoup.net/NTL/.

There's a few libraries that affect how NTL works. GMP is a multiprecision arithmetic library that can be used by NTL to represent large integers. Even though it is not expected to affect the overall performances of FAAST, compiling NTL with GMP is still the recommended method. GMP can be downloaded at http://gmplib.org/.

gf2x is a library for multiplying polynomials over the binary field. If you work on characteristic 2 fields and you are interested in performance, then we recommend that you install gf2x and compile NTL with support for it. gf2x can be downloaded at http://gforge.inria.fr/projects/gf2x/.

Instructions on how to compile NTL with support for GMP and/or gf2x can be found at http://www.shoup.net/ntl/doc/tour.html .

Compiling

To compile FAAST, simply type

	tar xzf \package_name-\package_version.tgz
	cd \package_name-\package_version/
	./configure
	make
	make check

During the configure script FAAST checks for the presence of NTL, GMP and gf2x; checks for GMP and gf2x are optional and can be disabled through --disable-ntl-static. If NTL has been built as a shared library, passing --disable-ntl-static might speed up the compilation.

Notice that you might have to specify the paths to NTL, GMP or gf2x if they are installed in some exotic directory; see configure --help.

Installing

To install FAAST, from the build directory type

	su
	make install

The library will be installed to a default location, you can change this by giving a different --prefix to the configure script.

Generating the documentation

This library is documented using doxygen and you must have it installed in order to generate the documentation. You can download doxygen at http://www.doxygen.org/. You will also need $\mbox{\LaTeX}$ and $\mbox{\Xy-pic}$ to generate some formulae, graphs and the two logos in this paragraph.

Once doxygen is installed, you can generate this documentation by typing

	make doc

This creates a directory doc/html containing the documentation. You can edit the file doxy.conf.in to enable more options and output formats, refer to the doxygen manual.

If you are interested in understanding the internals of FAAST, you can generate a more detailed documentation by typing

	make doc-dev

This creates a directory doc-dev/html containing the documentation.