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MATLAB bindings

These bindings allow to use preCICE with MATLAB based on the C++ MEX and C data API. They are still in an experimental state, so please utilize them with care. Any feedback is welcome.

Note that the first two digits of the version number of the bindings indicate the major and minor version of the preCICE version that the bindings support. The last digit represents the version of the bindings. Example: v3.1.0 and v3.1.1 of the bindings represent versions 0 and 1 of the bindings that are compatible with preCICE v3.1.x. Note that this versioning scheme was introduced from bindings v3.1.0, which is different than the old versioning scheme.

Requirements

MATLAB R2018a or later is required. The bindings are actively tested on versions R2023b, R2023a, R2022b, R2022a, and R2021b.

Restrictions

  • An issue causes MATLAB to crash upon SolverInterface initialization if precice was compiled with openmpi. This issue can be resolved by installing openmpi from source using the option -disable-dlopen. For reference, see e.g. here. Alternatively, the user can switch to a different MPI implementation, e.g. MPICH (other implementations were not tested). Note that for using a different MPI implementation one has to specify the alternative implementation while building preCICE. For more information on this issue, please refer to #19.
  • Currently, only one instance of the SolverInterface class can exist at the same time in a single MATLAB instance. If the user wishes to couple multiple participants based on MATLAB, he is supposed to start them in different MATLAB instances. If, for some reason, the user needs multiple instances of SolverInterface, he should use the OOP variant (Multiple instances of SolverInterfaceOOP can exist at the same time).
  • There is a known bug, if the SolverInterface destructor is called. For a possible workaround refer to precice/precice#378. This issue is tracked in #28.

Compilation

The MATLAB script compile_matlab_bindings_for_precice.m located in this folder compiles the bindings. Simply running it from MATLAB should do.

In some cases, MATLAB's own libstdc++ library may be an old version, which leads an error while compiling the bindings, of the kind "version 'CXXABI_1.3.11' not found". In this case, one can set MATLAB to use another version of libstdc++ with the LD_PRELOAD variable (see here for further reference). For example, for using the system's default libstdc++, one can open MATLAB with the following command:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 matlab

The script uses pkg-config to determine the necessary flags. If pkg-config is unable to find the flags, the script will throw an error. Please refer to the Linking to preCICE page in the preCICE wiki for details regarding pkg-config.

If using the script fails for some reason, please let us know.

Add to path

To use the bindings, you have to add this folder (e.g. /home/user/matlab-bindings) to your MATLAB path using addpath. Adding this folder alone is sufficient (you don't have to use genpath). You can let MATLAB do this at startup by adding the respective line to your startup.m, see here.

Usage

The API introduces a MATLAB wrapper class for the SolverInterface class and a namespace for the preCICE constants. They are accessible in MATLAB as precice.SolverInterface and precice.constants respectively.

The function syntax is mostly identical to the syntax of the C++ API. The following things should be noted:

  • C++ ints correspond to MATLAB int32s.
  • Wherever the C++ API expects pointers, the MATLAB API expects a matrix/vector instead. If the user wants to pass vector data (e.g. vertex coordinates) for multiple vertices, the shape of the corresponding matrix must be [dim numVertices], where dim is the problem dimension. Thus, each column must correspond to a vertex, and each line must correspond to a coordinate - not vice versa. Users should try to respect this in their MATLAB code from the start, because transposing can be costly for huge matrices.
  • There are two changes in the input arguments for the MATLAB API with respect to the C++ API:
    • Output arguments which are pointers passed as input arguments to the C++ preCICE API are replaced by output matrices.
    • As the MATLAB API receives matrices/vectors instead of pointers, the size (e.g. number of vertices) of the arrays is not an input argument, but instead it is inferred from the array.

As an example, the C++ API function

readBlockScalarData(int dataID, int size, const int *valueIndices, double *values)

is found in the MATLAB bindings as

values = readBlockScalarData(dataID, valueIndices)

Out of process variant

The C++ MEX API supports out of process execution of MEX functions. This feature is implemented in the class precice.SolverInterfaceOOP. This class works exactly like precice.SolverInterface. Internally, however, the gateway function that calls the preCICE routines is run on a mexHost object. This has the following advantages:

  • Multiple instances of SolverInterfaceOOP can exist at the same time.
  • If the gateway function crashes, then MATLAB will not crash. Only the mexHost object will crash. However, using the OOP variant is significantly slower than the normal in process

Troubleshooting

libprecice.so cannot be found

Invalid MEX-file 'SOMEPATH/matlab-bindings/+precice/@SolverInterface/private/preciceGateway.mexa64':
libprecice.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

Tells you that the MATLAB bindings cannot find the C++ library preCICE. Make sure that you installed preCICE correctly.

You can also run pkg-config --cflags --libs libprecice to see whether the paths provided by pkg-config point to the correct place. Example output, if everything is correct and you installed preCICE via sudo make install:

$ pkg-config --cflags --libs libprecice
-I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lprecice

If everything until this point looks good and you are still facing problems and you installed preCICE to a custom location using CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, MATLAB might not be able to find libprecice.so, since it is not discoverable. Please add the location of libprecice.so (see pkg-config --libs-only-L libprecice, without the -L) to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH. For further instructions refer to the MATLAB documentation.

version GLIBCXX_X.X.XX not found

Invalid MEX-file 'SOMEPATH/matlab-bindings/+precice/@SolverInterface/private/preciceGateway.mexa64':
/usr/local/MATLAB/R2021a/bin/glnxa64/../../sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6:
version `GLIBCXX_3.4.26' not found (required by /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libprecice.so.2)

MATLAB ships with a version of libstdc++.so.6 that may be too old. This version does not find the preCICE C++ library.

So far, this problem was encountered with Ubuntu Version 20.04.04 LTS, GNU C++ 10.5.0, on MATLAB versions R2020b (Update 8), R2021a, R2021b (Update 7). See #53 for more details.

There are two possible solutions:

(recommended) Update your MATLAB installation

This problem does not appear, for example, for MATLAB R2023b (Update 7). For information on how to update MATLAB, please refer to the MATLAB documentation.

Set LD_PRELOAD to use the system-provided libstdc++.so.6

Please start MATLAB with the following command:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 matlab

Old versioning scheme

Bindings versions up to v3.0.0.0 have four digits, where the first three digits are the supported preCICE version, and the fourth digit is the bindings version. Example: v2.0.0.1 and v2.0.0.2 of the bindings represent versions 1 and 2 of the bindings that are compatible with preCICE v2.0.0. We dropped the third digit of the preCICE version as bugfix releases are always compatible and do not impact the bindings. The new three digit format is now consistent with other preCICE bindings.

Contributors