Node:Installation and Supported Hardware/Software, Next:Usage of Multi-threaded FFTW, Previous:Multi-threaded FFTW, Up:Multi-threaded FFTW

#### 5.1.1 Installation and Supported Hardware/Software

All of the FFTW threads code is located in the `threads` subdirectory of the FFTW package. On Unix systems, the FFTW threads libraries and header files can be automatically configured, compiled, and installed along with the uniprocessor FFTW libraries simply by including `--enable-threads` in the flags to the `configure` script (see Installation on Unix).

The threads routines require your operating system to have some sort of shared-memory threads support. Specifically, the FFTW threads package works with POSIX threads (available on most Unix variants, from GNU/Linux to MacOS X) and Win32 threads. We also support using OpenMP or SGI MP compiler directives to launch threads, enabled by using `--with-openmp` or `--with-sgimp` in addition to `--enable-threads`. (This may be useful if you are employing that sort of directive in your own code, in order to minimize conflicts.) If you have a shared-memory machine that uses a different threads API, it should be a simple matter of programming to include support for it; see the file `fftw_threads-int.h` for more detail.

Ideally, of course, you should also have multiple processors in order to get any benefit from the threaded transforms.