Installation instructions

The QPtomographer package uses the standard setuptools Python infrastructure, providing a setup.py script like most other Python packages.

It may also be installed, as most other Python packages, using pip.

There are some little things to set up first however.

Prerequisite: Install BLAS/Lapack

You need a working installation of BLAS/Lapack. This is provided by default on Mac OS X, in which case you don’t have to do anything. On Ubuntu, run the command:

sudo apt-get install liblapack-dev

Prerequisite: Compile SCS

You need to compile SCS ≥ 2.0. We make use of this great library to calculate the diamond norm distance between two channels. (Unfortunately, it is not enough to install the scs Python package, because we need SCS’s C interface.)

Make sure you have downloaded SCS version 2.0.0 or later.

Download and unpack SCS, say in $HOME/Downloads/, and compile it with specific options set. This can be done as follows.

First, download the latest version of SCS into your Downloads directory, unpack that archive, and enter that directory. (You may work in a different directory; the following instructions assume you unpacked SCS in the Downloads directory.)

> cd Downloads
> tar xvfz scs-2.0.2.tar.gz
> cd scs-2.0.2

If you are on Mac OS X, compile SCS with the following command:

> make CTRLC=0 USE_OPENMP=0 USE_LAPACK=1 BLASLDFLAGS="-framework Accelerate"

Otherwise (e.g. on Linux), compile SCS with the following command:

> make CTRLC=0 USE_OPENMP=0 USE_LAPACK=1

Notes:

  • CTRLC=0 is needed because we will catch Ctrl+C keystrokes ourselves, and we don’t want SCS to interfere with this.

  • We neeed USE_OPENMP=0 because our invokation of SCS is already within parallel tasks, so we want to avoid double-parallelism which won’t speed up anything.

  • Lapack is needed for solving SDPs, so it must be enabled with USE_LAPACK=1.

    You might have to adjust or specify the necessary flags for linking to BLAS/LAPACK (the variable BLASLDFLAGS=...). On Mac OS X, use "-framework Accelerate"; on Ubuntu, install for example openblas and use "-llapack -lblas". The defaults might be satisfactory. Try and see what works.

Prerequisite: Install tomographer and other Python packages

Make sure you have already installed the tomographer package (version ≥ 5.4) along with its prerequisites, as described here. Basically, you should run the following commands depending on whether you are using anaconda or pip:

# If you are using *pip* (or if you're not sure):
pip install numpy scipy pybind11
pip install tomographer

# If you are using *conda*:
conda install numpy scipy gcc libgcc
conda install -c conda-forge pybind11
pip install tomographer

All pip install commands (e.g. pip install SOMEPACKAGE) might have to be prefixed by sudo -H (e.g. sudo -H pip install SOMEPACKAGE) if you need administrator priviledges, or you can use the option --user to install into a user directory (e.g. pip install SOMEPACKAGE --user).

The QPtomographer package also requires qutip. Install it before proceeding:

# if you are using *pip* (or if you're not sure)
pip install qutip

# if you are using *conda*
conda install -c conda-forge qutip

Download and install QPtomographer

Simplest solution using pip:

The simplest solution to install QPtomographer is using pip. However, you need to set the environment variable SCS_ROOT to the root directory where you downloaded and compiled SCS:

# Works with both *conda* and *pip* users:
SCS_ROOT=$HOME/Downloads/scs-2.0.2 pip install QPtomographer

Alternative: Building and installing QPtomographer manually:

You can also install QPtomographer from source. First, obtain the most recent version of QPtomographer from the releases page.

Then, after unpacking the archive, run the python setup script:

> SCS_ROOT=$HOME/Downloads/scs-2.0.2 python setup.py install

specifying the path where you compiled SCS using the environment variable SCS_ROOT.

Or, to install as administrator:

> sudo -H SCS_ROOT=$HOME/Downloads/scs-2.0.2 python setup.py install

Important

You should use the same compiler as the one you used to compile the tomographer package.

If you leave the default this shouldn’t be a problem.