Quick Install Guide¶
This quick install guide outlines the basic steps needed to install OpenMC on your computer. For more detailed instructions on configuring and installing OpenMC, see Installation and Configuration in the User’s Manual.
Installing on Linux/Mac with Conda¶
Conda is an open source package management system and environments management system for installing multiple versions of software packages and their dependencies and switching easily between them. OpenMC can be installed in a conda environment. First, conda should be installed with either Anaconda Distribution or Miniconda. Once you have conda installed on your system, OpenMC can be installed via the conda-forge channel.
First, add the conda-forge channel with:
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict
Then create and activate a new conda enviroment called openmc-env (or whatever you wish) with OpenMC installed.
conda create --name openmc-env openmc
conda activate openmc-env
You are now in a conda environment called openmc-env that has OpenMC installed.
Installing on Linux/Mac/Windows with Docker¶
OpenMC can be easily deployed using Docker on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system. With Docker running, execute the following command in the shell to download and run a Docker image with the most recent release of OpenMC from DockerHub:
docker run openmc/openmc:latest
This will take several minutes to run depending on your internet download speed. The command will place you in an interactive shell running in a Docker container with OpenMC installed.
Note
The docker run command supports many options for spawning
containers including mounting volumes from the host filesystem,
which many users will find useful.
Installing from Source using Spack¶
Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software on a wide variety of platforms and environments. Please follow Spack’s setup guide to configure the Spack system.
To install the latest OpenMC with the Python API, use the following command:
spack install py-openmc
For more information about customizations including MPI, see the detailed installation instructions using Spack. Once installed, environment/lmod modules can be generated or Spack’s load feature can be used to access the installed packages.
Manually Installing from Source¶
Obtaining prerequisites on Ubuntu¶
When building OpenMC from source, all prerequisites can be installed using the package manager:
sudo apt install g++ cmake libhdf5-dev libpng-dev
After the packages have been installed, follow the instructions to build from source below.
Obtaining prerequisites on macOS¶
For an OpenMC build with multithreading enabled, a package manager like Homebrew should first be installed. Then, the following packages should be installed, for example in Homebrew via:
brew install llvm cmake xtensor hdf5 python libomp libpng
The compiler provided by the above LLVM package should be used in place of the
one provisioned by XCode, which does not support the multithreading library used
by OpenMC. To ensure CMake picks up the correct compiler, make sure that either
the CXX environment variable is set to the brew-installed clang++
or that the directory containing it is on your PATH environment
variable. Common locations for the brew-installed compiler are
/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin and /usr/local/opt/llvm/bin.
After the packages have been installed, follow the instructions to build from source below.
Building Source on Linux or macOS¶
All OpenMC source code is hosted on GitHub. If you have git, a modern C++ compiler, CMake, and HDF5 installed, you can download and install OpenMC by entering the following commands in a terminal:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc.git
cd openmc
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install
This will build an executable named openmc and install it (by default in
/usr/local/bin). If you do not have administrator privileges, the cmake command
should specify an installation directory where you have write access, e.g.
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/.local ..
The openmc Python package must be installed separately. The easiest way
to install it is using pip.
From the root directory of the OpenMC repository, run:
python -m pip install .
By default, OpenMC will be built with multithreading support. To build distributed-memory parallel versions of OpenMC using MPI or to configure other options, directions can be found in the detailed installation instructions.