This tutorial will walk you through the process of installing pyrticle. To follow, you need a few basic standard software packages:
pyrticle has a number of prerequisites that need to be installed for it to be usable. Once these prerequisites are installed, installing this package is fairly straightforward, because it will simply reuse the build configuration that you create for its prerequisites.
Note
Some of the pyrticle‘s prerequisites have overlapping dependencies. For example, nearly every package depends on Boost and/or numpy. If multiple packages call for the same dependency, installing that dependency only once is sufficient.
Navigate to the installation documentation for the hedge Discontinuous Galerkin solver and follow the instructions there. Since pyrticle requires the BLAS, you may want to make sure that you also compile hedge with support for the BLAS, as documented.
To make its simulation state accessible to visualization software, pyrticle relies on the Silo data exchange format. In order to write Silo files, pyrticle requires Pylo, a Python interface to the standard Silo data access library.
To install Pylo, please navigate to its installation tutorial.
Download this snapshot of the Boost Unordered Container Library, and unpack it:
$ tar xfz boost-unordered.tar.gz
Then add the boost-unordered directory that was unpacked as the root of the archive’s contents to the BOOST_INC_DIR variable in your .aksetup-defaults.py file, located in your home directory. That is, if this variable used to read:
BOOST_INC_DIR = ['/home/andreas/pool/include/boost-1_35']
change it to read:
BOOST_INC_DIR = [
'/home/andreas/pool/include/boost-1_35',
'/home/andreas/boost-unordered',
]
Add the following lines to the file .aksetup-defaults.py in your home directory:
HAVE_LAPACK = True
LAPACK_LIB_DIR = ['/where/your/lapack/is/installed']
LAPACK_LIBNAME = ['your_lapack_libname'] # without leading lib and trailing .a/.so
You will need to customize these lines for your LAPACK install locations.
We will assume here that you have obtained a source code snapshot of pyrticle. Place this file in the directory from where you wish to install pyrticle and type:
$ tar xfz pyrticle.git-VERSION.tar.gz
or:
$ tar xf pyrticle.git-VERSION.tar.gz
(Whenever you see the “$” dollar sign in this tutorial, this means you should enter this at your shell prompt. You don’t have to be root. A few spots are marked with “sudo” to show that these do require root privileges if you are using a Python interpreter that is install globally.)
Warning
While the file will be named .tar.gz, your browser may already have removed the gzip compression, and left an archive in uncompressed tar format. One of the above commands will work, but which depends how you downloaded the archive.
Actually compiling and installing pyrticle should now be fairly simple:
$ cd pyrticle.git
$ sudo python setup.py install
Get some coffee while pyrticle is installed. Note that depending on the software versions you have installed, this may print some (actually quite a bunch of) warnings. Most of these are fixed in newer versions of Python and Boost. This is no cause for concern–the resulting software will work just fine. If you get no errors, congratulations! You have successfully built pyrticle.
Next, we suggest that you continue on to the next section and try your hand at running some simple simulations.