Windows

prerequisites

The following packages must be installed first:

  • gmake

  • cmake

  • ninja

  • perl

These packages are all included in the Strawberry Perl package.

After installing the latest release of Strawberry Perl, check whether the required packages were successfully installed on your computer, by opening a Windows command prompt (press Windows key + R, type cmd, and hit Enter) and running the following commands:

gmake --version

cmake --version

ninja --version

perl --version

If each of the above package reports a version number, then the installation was successful.

Important

  • The version number of CMake must be at least 3.20 or newer.

  • The ninja version should be at least 1.10.

  • The perl version is 5 or higher.

In addition to these packages, git and curl must also be installed. For the installation, please refer to the official Git for Windows website.

The final step is to install the Intel Fortran Essentials package which also includes the MPI libraries. The installation method here is the offline installer. This installer can be downloaded by entering the following command in a Windows command prompt:

curl https://registrationcenter-download.intel.com/akdlm/IRC_NAS/33676fcf-14a3-4e96-a9b9-72976b1145d9/intel-fortran-essentials-2025.3.1.25_offline.exe --output intel-fortran-essentials-2025.3.1.25_offline.exe

For a proper installation the Build Tools for Visual Studio is required. Download this VS Build Tools installer:

curl -SL https://aka.ms/vs/stable/vs_buildtools.exe --output vs_buildtools.exe

Run the VS Build Tools installer and ensure you have selected the Desktop development with C++ workload:

vs_buildtools.exe

This might take a while. After completing installation of VS Build Tools, set the following environment variable permanently:

setx VS2026INSTALLDIR "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\18\BuildTools" /m

Warning

Depending on the installed version (here: Build Tools for Visual Studio 2026), the path above may be different. Check where the BuildTools folder is located and adjust the path if necessary.

Next, run the Intel Fortran Essentials installer:

intel-fortran-essentials-2025.3.1.25_offline.exe

Follow the instruction steps to complete the successful installation. This might take a while.

Note

This installs version 2025.3.1 of Intel Fortran and is not necessarily the latest version. Check this page to get the latest version.

Finally, we check whether the installation was successful.

With the next two steps, an Intel oneAPI terminal will be started, after which the necessary environment variables will be set.

  • Click on the Start button to open the Start menu.

  • Type intel oneapi in the search box at the top.

Type ifx --version to verify Intel Fortran Compiler was installed.

installation SWAN

Once the prerequisites are taken care of, installing SWAN on your machine is a four-step process.

  1. download SWAN

    Open an Intel oneAPI command prompt, navigate to your Downloads folder, copy the command below, right-click in the prompt window to paste and press Enter.

    git clone https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/citg/wavemodels/swan.git && cd swan

  2. configure SWAN

    gmake config

  3. build SWAN

    gmake

  4. install SWAN

    gmake install

SWAN is installed at folder %LocalAppData%\Programs\wavemodels\swan by default. The current value of %LocalAppData% can be checked by typing

echo %LocalAppData%

To run SWAN, you need to make sure that the \bin folder in this directory is added to your system’s PATH. Open command prompt and type

setx path "%path%;%LocalAppData%\Programs\wavemodels\swan\bin"

Warning

To check the new value of %path% by echoing, first close the command prompt terminal and then open again.

options for configuring SWAN

If desired, the build can be configured by passing one or more options below to gmake config.

fc=<compiler>

the Fortran90 compiler to use [default is determined by CMake]

mpi=on

enable build of SWAN with MPI [off by default]

prefix=<folder>

set the installation folder [%LocalAppData%\Programs\wavemodels\swan by default]

For example, the following command

gmake config prefix=C:\Program Files\swan

will configure SWAN to be installed at C:\Program Files\swan.

building with MPI support

The SWAN source code also supports memory-distributed parallelism for high performance computing applications. A message passing approach is employed based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard that enables communication between independent processors.

The Intel Fortran Essentials package also contains the Intel MPI Library. This can be checked with the following command inserted in the Intel oneAPI command prompt:

mpiexec --version

We proceed to build SWAN. First, we configure SWAN to be built with support for MPI, as follows

gmake config fc=mpiifx.bat mpi=on

The actual building is done by typing

gmake

Finally, to install SWAN, run the following command

gmake install

SWAN is now ready for high performance computing.

clean up

To remove all files installed by gmake install, type the following command

gmake uninstall

If you want to remove the build directory and all files that have been created after running gmake or gmake build, then run

gmake clobber