libadb

Fast General Purpose Astronomical Database.

libadb provides a fast and efficient way to query and interact with various astronomical catalogs. The project includes a core C library (adb) and several example applications that demonstrate importing and querying specific astronomical datasets (like NGC, Sky2000, Tycho, GSC, and HyperLeda).

Dependencies

To build libadb, you will need the following dependencies:

• CMake (version 3.10 or higher)
• C Compiler (supporting C99 standard, e.g., GCC or Clang)
• zlib (zlib1g-dev on Debian/Ubuntu)
• libftp (ftplib-dev on Debian/Ubuntu)
• Standard Math Library (libm, usually included with libc)

Optional Dependencies for Hardware Acceleration

• AVX Support: A CPU and compiler that support Advanced Vector Extensions (-mavx).
• OpenMP: A compiler with OpenMP support (for multi-threading).

Build Targets

The CMake build system defines the following targets:

• adb (Shared Library): The core library containing catalog parsing, spatial indexing (HTM/KD-Tree), and solving logic.
• Examples (Executables):
  • sky2k: Example for the Sky2000 catalog.
  • ngc: Example for the NGC catalog.
  • hyperleda: Example for the HyperLeda catalog.
  • tycho: Example for the Tycho catalog.
  • gsc: Example for the Guide Star Catalog (see examples/Readme.md for specific GSC 1.1 import instructions).

Build Instructions

libadb uses CMake for its build system.

1. Configure the Project

   Create a build directory and run CMake. You can enable optional features during this step.

   # Basic configuration
   cmake -B build -S .
   
   # Configuration with debug symbols and hardware acceleration enabled
   cmake -B build -S . -DENABLE_DEBUG=ON -DENABLE_AVX=ON -DENABLE_OPENMP=ON

2. Build the Project

   Use CMake to compile the library and examples (using multiple CPU cores with -j):

   cmake --build build -j

3. Install (Optional)

   To install the libadb shared library, headers, and pkg-config file to your system (e.g., /usr/local):

   sudo cmake --install build

4. Create Packages (Optional)

   To build .deb and .rpm packages for distribution, you can use cpack from within the build directory (after compiling):

   cd build
   cpack -G "DEB;RPM"

   Alternatively, you can build the packages directly using make:

   make package

Usage

After building, you can find the compiled shared library in build/src/ and the example executables in build/examples/.

For instance, to run the NGC example:

./build/examples/ngc