Important note:

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

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 in 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.

There is a good chance to make it compile python-meep for Python3 instead of the default Python2, but I did not test it thoroughly enough.

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 (amd64) (these versions had previously issues with guile and friends, they appear to work, however)
• Debian Jessie

Experimental/partially working:

• Fedora (and other RPM-based systems)
  • (?) optional library 'harminv' is missing, can be manually compiled if needed
  • (?) dependency 'pkg-config' is missing (not known if this is serious)
• 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:

• 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.