Installation

Requirements

You need to have the following software properly installed in order to build PETSc for Python:

[1]Unless you have appropiatelly configured and built PETSc PETSc without MPI (configure option --with-mpi=0).
[2]In order to build PETSc with shared libraries, you have to pass --with-shared option to PETSc’s configure script.
[3]You may need to use a parallelized version of the Python interpreter with some MPI-1 implementations (e.g. MPICH1).

Using setuptools

If you already have a working PETSc you can take advantage of setuptools’s easy_install command:

$ export PETSC_DIR=/path/to/petsc
$ export PETSC_ARCH=linux-gnu # may not be required

$ easy_install petsc4py

Using distutils

Downloading

The PETSc for Python package is available for download at the project website generously hosted by Google Code. You can use wget to get a release tarball:

$ wget http://petsc4py.googlecode.com/files/petsc4py-X.X.X.tar.gz

Building

After unpacking the release tarball:

$ tar -zxf petsc4py-X.X.X.tar.gz
$ cd petsc4py-X.X.X

the distribution is ready for building.

Note

Mac OS X users employing a Python distribution built with universal binaries may need to set the environment variables MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET, SDKROOT, and ARCHFLAGS to appropriate values. As an example, assume your Mac is running Snow Leopard on a 64-bit Intel processor and you want to override the hard-wired cross-development SDK in Python configuration, your environment should be modified like this:

$ export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6
$ export SDKROOT=/
$ export ARCHFLAGS='-arch x86_64'

Some environmental configuration is needed to inform the location of PETSc. You can set (using setenv, export or what applies to you shell or system) the environmental variables PETSC_DIR, and PETSC_ARCH indicating where you have built/installed PETSc:

$ export PETSC_DIR=/usr/local/petsc
$ export PETSC_ARCH=linux-gnu

Alternatively, you can edit the file setup.cfg and provide the required information below the [config] section:

[config]
petsc_dir  = /usr/local/petsc
petsc_arch = linux-gnu
...

Finally, you can build the distribution by typing:

$ python setup.py build

Installing

After building, the distribution is ready for installation.

You can do a site-install type:

$ python setup.py install

or, in case you need root privileges:

$ su -c 'python setup.py install'

This will install the petsc4py package in the standard location prefix/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages.

You can also do a user-install type. Threre are two options depending on the target Python version.

  • For Python 2.6 and up:

    $ python setup.py install --user
  • For Python 2.5 and below (assuming your home directory is available through the HOME environment variable):

    $ python setup.py install --home=$HOME

    and then add $HOME/lib/python or $HOME/lib64/python to your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

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