Installation on Apple Silicon

[lorentzloi]

Description

The reported installation procedure with Conda is not working with Apple Silicon laptop. The package cannot be found with the condo-forge channel.
Is there a way to install OpenMC in this framework?

[jbae11]

hello, have you tried this?

https://openmc.discourse.group/t/issue-with-installing-on-mac-m1-using-conda/5371

[gridley]

Have you tried building from source?

https://docs.openmc.org/en/stable/quickinstall.html#obtaining-prerequisites-on-macos

[matthewfeickert]

hello, have you tried this?

https://openmc.discourse.group/t/issue-with-installing-on-mac-m1-using-conda/5371

Why is this being recommended? https://blog.rtwilson.com/how-to-create-an-x64-intel-conda-environment-on-your-apple-silicon-mac-arm-conda-install/ is advocating that you force an install of a distribution for a platform other than your own. If anything runs that's only due to emulation and that's not a viable solution for anything that is performance focused. This is not a good thing to recommend.

Have you tried building from source?

https://docs.openmc.org/en/stable/quickinstall.html#obtaining-prerequisites-on-macos

If source builds are known to work for Apple silicon, why can't the conda-forge feedstock (https://github.com/conda-forge/openmc-feedstock) be updated to include an osx-arm64 distribution?

[paulromano]

@matthewfeickert Yes, a source build on conda-forge would be preferable. I don't know of any fundamental reason why it wouldn't work. I don't have the bandwidth to work on this myself at the moment but would very much welcome a PR to the feedstock adding that. I see you have some experience working with conda-forge @matthewfeickert 😉

[matthewfeickert]

I don't have the bandwidth to work on this myself at the moment but would very much welcome a PR to the feedstock adding that

That's fair, but I'm only coming here to ask as my nuclear physics friends are complaining to me that they can't get openMP installed and the installation docs have errors. My support of the HEP software community on conda-forge does not mean I volunteer to fix everyone else's problems.

[paulromano]

Understood 😄 thanks for the feedback and hopefully someone will get to that fix on the feedstock soon

[matthewfeickert]

Sorry that was overly grumpy of me — not an excuse for being mean online, but I'm currently sick and had a raging headache when posting that.

If people tag me on conda-forge PRs with questions I can point in directions that I think would be useful, but I don't want to become an effective maintainer for the feedstock.

[kkiesling]

@paulromano @matthewfeickert - I have an attempt at adding support for arm64 architectures via conda here. Verdict is still out on whether or not this is will be successful though..