The only thing that needs to be done when heaplab is moved to a new machine is to select a suitable C++ compiler (by the CPP variable), and set the optimization flags (OPTFLAGS) to match your compiler and hardware. Part of the OPTFLAGS variable is a definition of a macro CACHE_SIZE that informs the external heap implementations of the size of your primary cache in bytes. If the value is incorrect, the external heaps may run at below the maximum performance.
Be aware that the gnu g++ compiler is not the best around. If you can get access to a commercial C++ implementation it will probably generate better code. If you use g++ you must define -DGNUC as part of the compilation flags for the driver programs to compile.
If you have limited memory, i.e. less than 64 Mbyte, either you should lower MAXSZ or prepare for a visit by an angry sysadmin. The default setup uses 32Mbyte of memory for data plus some overhead.
These variables are set in the first 10 lines of the makefile.
The next thing to do is make all. This will build all programs and generate a number of plots comparing the different heap implementations