AthenaK is designed to use as few external libraries as possible, enabling so-called "hermetic builds". The only requirements are:

• the Kokkos Core library (can be cloned automatically with the source code)
• cmake (version 3.0 or later)
• a C++17 (or later) compliant compiler

To build AthenaK for heterogeneous architectures additional compilers and software provided by the vendor may be required, such as a CUDA toolkit to build on NVidia GPUs. See the build or Notes for Specific Machines links for examples.

Additional, optional requirements are

• a MPI library (for distributed memory parallelism). On GPUs, device-aware MPI libraries are required.
• python3 for running many of the data analysis scripts included with the code