Installation

Operating System Support & Requirements

Linux

VoidFinder is currently only fully supported on Linux, but may run on OSX and other Unix variants.

V² is fully supported on Linux.

VoidRender is not expected to work well with the Wayland graphical backend. VoidRender works well on the older and more stable Xorg backend, on Intel, Nvidia, and AMD graphical drivers. Note that for extreme performance settings (very high numbers of voids or a SPHERE_TRIANGULARIZATION_DEPTH greater than 3), a discrete gpu from AMD or Nvidia is highly recommended for a smooth visualization.

It may be helpful to install the following for VoidRender on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

OSX

The authors have successfully run VoidFinder with full multi-processing power on Mac/OSX, but until Apple guarantees a POSIX- or Single Unix Specification-compliant fork() system call, full multi-processing VoidFinder cannot be guaranteed. However, the single-process version of VoidFinder should always work on OSX to the best of our knowledge, and (as of March 2022), VoidFinder seems to be working correctly on OSX.

V² runs on OSX.

VoidRender is expected to work on OSX using the Intel graphical drivers.

Windows

The authors have encountered difficulty compiling the VAST Cython code on the Windows platform, and more importantly the fork() system call is not supported by Windows. Given its small popularity as a scientific computing platform, we have no plans (as of May 2022) to support Windows.

Prerequisite Libraries

VoidFinder uses Cython to speed up its operations, so when building from source you will need a C compiler like gcc.

VoidRender requires OpenGL \(\geq\) 1.2.

Building VAST

VAST does not yet have any pre-built wheels or distribution packages, so clone the repository from https://github.com/DESI-UR/VAST.

VAST will install like a normal python package via the shell command:

python setup.py install

It is important to remember that this will attempt to install vast into the site-packages directory of whatever python environment that you are using. To check on this, you can type:

which python

into a normal unix shell and it will give you a path like /usr/bin/python or /opt/anaconda3/bin/python, which lets you know which python binary your python command actually points to.

Developing VoidFinder

If you are actively developing VAST, you can install the package via:

python setup.py develop

which installs a symlink into your python environment’s site-packages directory, and the symlink points back to wherever your local copy of the VAST directory is.

If you are developing VAST and need to rebuild the cython, from the VAST directory run:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

Occasionally, it can be helpful to know the following command:

cython -a *.pyx

which can be run from within the directory where the .pyx files live (currently VAST/python/vast/voidfinder/) to “manually” build the cython (.pyx) files.

Installing VAST without admin privileges

If you are working in an environment where you cannot install VAST, or you do not have permissions to install it into the python environment that you are using, add --user to your choice of build from above. For example:

python setup.py develop --user