Installation

Please use these instructions to build and run Fidimag on Linux, OS X, or Windows WSL. Fidimag can work in Windows using a Python disctribution such as Anaconda or Mamba, with a C/C++ compiler.

Linux

We recommend using mamba <https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/> (or conda). First create an environment with Python >= 3.10.

mamba create -n fidimag python=3.13 -c conda-forge
mamba activate fidimag

Now clone the repository and cd into it.

git clone git@github.com:computationalmodelling/fidimag.git
cd fidimag

Install FFTW and Sundials. You will need a relatively recent installation of (> version 3) to use the Sundials script. You may also need to install development versions of

• BLAS

• LAPACK

though many Linux distributions come with these. Using the scripts provided in Fidimag:

cd bin
bash install-fftw.sh
bash install-sundials.sh

Python library dependencies are specified in the pyproject.toml file. We can install the fidimag library in editable mode, using pip:

pip install -e .

This will build the C/C++ modules and setup fidimag in our Python environment. We can make any changes to the Python code and not install the library again, unless we modified the C/C++ modules, which requires building again. Now we can simply call

python -c "import fidimag"

If you want to check everything has worked correctly, try the command ‘make test’ from the fidimag directory - if all tests pass, then you have a working installation!

Alternatively, for development, we can install the C/C++ modules

make

and link the Fidimag directory to the Python path

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/fidimag:$PYTHONPATH

Any changes to the C/C++ modules will require building only the modified codes and not all of the modules using make.

OS X

OS X has not shipped with GCC since the release of OS X Mavericks. You therefore need to install this, as the version of clang which ships does not support OpenMP. We advise that you use the brew package manager, and install gcc5. We also strongly advise that you install the Anaconda Python distribution - we do not test against the version of Python that comes with OS X.

Once you have done this, you need to specify the compiler you are using

export CC=gcc-5

You can then follow the same installation instructions as for ‘Other Linux’, but don’t worry about BLAS and LAPACK as Anaconda takes care of these for you.

Then, follow the instructions in ‘All Systems’ below.

Troubleshooting

If there is a problem with finding C/C++ sundials and fftw libraries, it is necessary to update the corresponding env variable

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/fidimag/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

OOMMF

Some additional tests check Fidimag against OOMMF. To run these, you need a working OOMMF installation, and you need need to tell the system where to find it. You can do this by setting the environment variable to the directory containing oommf.tcl

export OOMMF_PATH=/path/to/folder/containing/OOMMF