INSTALL.txt

HElib Installation Notes, October 2015
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To build HElib, you will need to have GMP and NTL libraries installed.

Many distributions come with GMP pre-installed.
If not, you can install GMP as follows.

1. Download GMP from http://www.gmplib.org
2. uncompress and cd into the directory gmp-XXX
3. On the command line:
      ./configure
      make
      sudo make install
4. This should install GMP into /usr/local

Once GMP is installed, you can install NTL as follows:
(NOTE: you will needs NTL v9.4.0 or higher)

1. Download NTL from http://www.shoup.net/ntl/download.html
2. uncompress and cd into the directory ntl-XXX/src
3. On the command line:
      ./configure NTL_GMP_LIP=on
      make
      sudo make install
4. This should install NTL into /usr/local


Now that you have these libraries in place, you can cd to the HElib
src directory to build HElib.

Right now, the "build system" for HElib is very rudimentary: no
configure script and just a Makefile (with no "make install").
The Makefile will build the static library fhe.a in the HElib src
directory, and then one can build applications programs based on
fhe.a, also in the HElib src directory (or set the include and library
parameters to include the right things). Hopefully, this build system
will be improved in the future.

Before building HElib, you may want to look at the Makefile, and
consider adjusting some of the defaults for CC and CFLAGS. The
defaults should be OK on most systems, but you can see the suggested
options, which are documented in the Makefile.

On the command line in the HElib src directory:

   make

will compile and build the library fhe.a. Once built, run

   make check

which will compile and runs a series of test programs.

If you want to build your own program based on HElib, the easiest way
to do it is to write the program in a file called myprog.cpp and then
run

   make myprog_x

which will compile myprog.cpp and link in fhe.a and all required
support libraries, and create the executable myprog_x.

Take a look at the programs Test_*.cpp for examples of using HElib.

Some comments:

* HElib uses C++11, for gcc you may need to specify the flags '-std=c++11'
to be able to compile (depending on the gcc version that you use).

* There are a re compilation flags that control some aspects of the
library, currently these are:

  -DUSE_ALT_CRT
    Tells HElib to use an alternative to the default DoubleCRT
    representation of polynomials. The DoubleCRT class is described in
    the (rather outdated) design document (Section 2.8). Specifying the
    flag USE_ALT_CRT invokes a different implementation of the same
    interfaces. This is an experimental feature, the alternative
    implementation can be either faster or slower,  depending on the
    operation mixture in use by the application.


  -DNO_HALF_SIZE_PRIME
    Tells HElib to not use the half size prime in the prime chain. By
    default, the modulus-chain in HElib consists of many "full-size primes"
    (of size n bits, typically n=50 or n=60 for 64-bit machines) and
    one "half-size prime" of n/2 bits. A level corresponds to n/2 bits
    in the size of the modulus, and dropping to a lower level is done
    either by dropping the half-size prime (if it is part of the current
    modulus) or by dropping a full-size prime and adding back the
    half-size prime (if it is not part of the current modulus).

    Specifying the flag NO_HALF_SIZE_PRIME makes all the primes the
    same size, with each prime corresponding to a level (so dropping to
    a lower level means dropping one of the primes).


   -DEVALMAP_CACHED=0
   -DEVALMAP_CACHED=1
     This flag only affect bootstrapping, it tells HElib to cache some
     constants that are used during recryption (rather than having to
     encode then anew with every recryption operation).

     EVALMAP_CACHED=0 caches these constants as ZZX'es, this takes
     less space but it means that they still need to be converted to
     DoubleCRT's with every recryption operation. 

     EVALMAP_CACHED=1 caches these constants directly as DoubleCRT's,
     this may take a significant amount of memeory.


   -DFHE_THREADS  tells HElib to enable generic multithreading capabilities;
                  must be used with a thread-enabled NTL and the -pthread
                  flag should be passed to gcc

   -DFHE_DCRT_THREADS  tells HElib to use a multithreading strategy at the
                       DoubleCRT level; requires -DFHE_THREADS (see above)

   -DFHE_BOOT_THREADS  tells HElib to use a multithreading strategy for
                       bootstrapping; requires -DFHE_THREADS (see above)


  -DDEBUG_PRINTOUT
    Add some debugging printouts