HomerReid / scuff-em

A comprehensive and full-featured computational physics suite for boundary-element analysis of electromagnetic scattering, fluctuation-induced phenomena (Casimir forces and radiative heat transfer), nanophotonics, RF device engineering, electrostatics, and more. Includes a core library with C++ and python APIs as well as many command-line applications.
http://www.homerreid.com/scuff-em
GNU General Public License v2.0
125 stars 50 forks source link

Installation on Mac #154

Open erikshipton opened 6 years ago

erikshipton commented 6 years ago

Dear Dr. Homer,

If possible it would be nice to have an installation guide for macOS Sierra. I'm currently running OSX 10.12.6 on a Macbook Pro with Homebrew installed. Any insight you can provide is appreciated.

Thank you, Erik

HomerReid commented 6 years ago

Thanks for raising this issue. I started looking into this and made some progress, but got stuck on the question of how to compile MPI codes on MacOS. As far as I can tell, the Apple-provided XCode package doesn't support MPI, and without MPI support SCUFF codes will be crippled performancewise, so the installation process will likely involve fetching and building an OpenMPI installation together with MPI-aware compilers. I'm working on figuring this out and will keep you posted.

In the meantime, if anybody knows anything about building MPI codes on MacOS, please comment!

HomerReid commented 6 years ago

I was able to get SCUFF-EM installed and running with good performance on MacOS Sierra 10.12.3 with XCode 8.1 and HomeBrew installed. I've revised the documentation to cover this:

http://homerreid.github.io/scuff-em-documentation/reference/Installing/

When you get a chance, please give it a try and let me know how it goes.

HomerReid commented 6 years ago

Whoops, just realized the documentation had temporarily reverted to an earlier version that didn't include the MacOS instructions. This is now fixed.

http://homerreid.github.io/scuff-em-documentation/reference/Installing/