Installation¶
To get started with synthesizer you need to complete the following setup steps.
Create a python environment
Clone the code base
Install the code
Download a grid
Creating a python environment¶
First create a virtual python environment. Synthesizer has been tested with Python 3.10, 3.11 and 3.12. You should replace this path with where you wish to install your virtual environment:
python3 -m venv /path_to_new_virtual_environment
source /path_to_new_virtual_environment/bin/activate
Cloning and installing the code¶
You can then clone the latest version of synthesizer from github, and finally install it:
git clone https://github.com/flaresimulations/synthesizer.git
cd synthesizer
pip install .
Make sure you stay up to date with the latest versions through git:
cd synthesizer
git pull origin main
If you are an advanced user directly developing the synthesizer code, and want to install the code in editable mode (so any changes in the code base will be reflected in the installation) please add the following flag:
pip install -e .
Installing with OpenMP¶
DISCLAIMER: This section is only important if you want to make use of shared memory parallelism for large calculations.
To make use of synthesizer’s shared memory parallelism you must first have OpenMP installed on your system. Most compilers come with OpenMP baked in with a few exceptions. This means installation with OpenMP is as simple as setting a flag at installation:
WITH_OPENMP=1 pip install .
On Linux this approach should be sufficient in almost all cases.
On OSX OpenMP must be installed via homebrew and setuptools appears to struggle automatically finding the install location.
In this situation, and any others where the automatic locating of OpenMP fails, the path to the installation can be stated explicitly:
WITH_OPENMP=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/libomp/18.1.6/ pip install .
Note that the path should point to the directory containing the include and lib directories.
For more details on configuration options, see the configuration options docs.
Downloading grids¶
Once you’ve installed the code, you’re almost ready to get started with synthesizer. The last step is to download a grid file, described in the next section.