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Important note:

As of 2017, the compilation script was reported to fail on Ubuntu 17.04 due to numpy API deprecation.

I recommend to try the new official guide at https://meep.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Build_From_Source/#building-from-source

Overview of python-meep-install

Setting up the electromagnetic simulation environment based on MEEP (http://ab-initio.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/Meep) is not straightforward. Author has spent several days making the simulation work on different 32/64-bit systems, use HDF5 libraries with multiprocessing support etc., and this experience has motivated the publication of this script.

It should automatically install MEEP, Python-meep and related programs/libraries at different linux distributions.

Use

Invocation

On supported systems, you can simply run the 'python-meep-install.sh' script as root, and after 5-10 minutes you should get a working environment.

If everything works and you can 'import meep_mpi' in your Python2 console, do not forget there are practical examples of its use at https://github.com/FilipDominec/python-meep-utils

Testing and debugging

If you wish to file a bug report, it is important to record the whole output of the installation script. To this end, call it as such:

sudo ./python-meep-install.sh 2>&1 | tee logs/`date +%y%m%d`-`lsb_release -sd | tr ' ' '_' `-`uname -m`.log

You may either attach the file to an e-mail to the author, or start a new issue on github. Your contribution will be welcome!

User options

By editing the --- Settings ----- section at the beginning of the 'python-meep-install.sh' script, you can choose which implementation of the MPI protocol will be used (openmpi, mpich, mpich2), or choose none to disable multiprocessing.

One can also select whether Python2 or Python3 is used, but the latter does not work. The current version of the python-meep sources fails to install with Python3 (tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and Fedora28). For more details, see issue #12.

System compatibility:

Tested to work fully on:

  • Ubuntu: 12.10, 14.10, 15.04, 15.10 (64-bit)
  • Ubuntu: 16.04, 16.10, 17.04 (64-bit) (these versions had previously issues with guile and friends, they appear to work, however)
  • Debian Jessie

Experimental/partially working:

  • Python-meep works also perfectly on Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit) and 17.04 (64-bit), but the meep scheme interpreter fails since it is compiled against "too new" version of guile 2.0.13 (see NanoComp/meep#57). Previous Ubuntu versions include guile 2.0.11 or older, with which meep (or meep-mpi) work fine.

Known not to work on:

  • Ubuntu: 18.04 (64-bit) compiles without error, but Python 2 reports: ImportError: No module named weave
  • Fedora 28 (and other RPM-based systems)
    • On import meep_mpi, I get an error AttributeError: module object has no attribute 'weave'.
      • 2018-07-30 Using python2, this is critical error: I cannot make python-meep to work on Fedora 28 (64-bit)
      • 2018-07-30 Using python3, meep could not be compiled (due to 'PyFile_Check' incompatibility in the installer, see above)
    • Additionally multiprocessing on Redhat-based distros requires manual enabling after installation (tested with openmpi only)
      • make sure that openmpi is there: dnf install openmpi (actually the installer does this for you)
      • as suggested at https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/59399/module-command-not-found-in-fedora-21/ one needs to run as root: dnf install environment-modules-4.1.3*
      • log in to a new terminal session as a normal user
      • then module load mpi/openmpi-x86_64
      • module load mpi and you can run your meep-based scripts. Note this is apparently not needed on Ubuntu/Debian.
    • optional library 'harminv' is missing, can be perhaps manually compiled if needed
    • dependency 'pkg-config' is reported missing (not known if this is serious)
  • Windows+Cygwin: h5utils did not compile correctly due to libpng error? (reported June 2017, triaged)

Possible issues

  • When some installation step fails, you will perhaps notice it at the end of the whole procedure since Python-meep compilation will be missing some dependencies. You will have to compare your compilation output against the files in the log/ directory.
  • The eigenmode source requires the 'mpb-dev' package, which is not available in Ubuntu 15.04 or earlier. You can still download the source and compile MPB on older systems, but in such a case, make sure you use the '-fPIC' compiler option.
  • Downloading of libctl-3.2.1.tar.gz seems to hang for several minutes sometimes (May 2017). Not a serious trouble, wait for it.
  • Sometimes the apt-get installer refuses to work, reporting either that "the dpkg database is locked" or that it "can not find the source code for ...". I guess this is due to the updater launching during the run of the installation script. It may help to re-run the script again.