Installing current version of ANUGA research code on Windows

Introduction

anuga is developed on Linux (Ubuntu) and hence the installation on Linux (Ubuntu) is more streamlined. But it is possible to install on windows. First you need to install the required python environment, then download the anuga source and then compile and test. The most time consuming part of the process is getting the python environment setup (which involves either a 500 MB download and some fixes, or a sequence of smaller downloads (see manual install)). But it can be done.

Python

We use python as our programming environment together with a number of standard python packages such as numpy, scipy, matplotlib, netcdf4. One way to install all the required packages is to use a distribution like python_xy, Anaconda and the related miniconda environments.

Miniconda

Download and run the ​Miniconda installer.

Be sure to choose the win32 python 2.7 version. This is the version for which we are developing.

At the moment anuga has memory problems with win64 so avoid that for the time being. You are most welcome to help track down the problems and provide a bug fix.

Anuga python package dependencies

Assuming conda is now installed, we need to install a number of other packages, via the conda install command.

Fire up cmd.exe and install all the packages via

conda install python=2.7 pip nose numpy scipy netcdf4 matplotlib gdal

GCC compiler

We need a gcc compiler to install anuga.

We suggest that you download and install the version of ​MinGW provided by ​TDM-GCC. Don't forget to mark the openmp and gfortran options in the "Choose Components" part of the installation.

Manual install

It is possible to install the required environment manually. You would need to install Mingw to provide a compiler, the standard distribution of python27 and then precompiled python libraries for numpy, scipy, matplotlib, netcdf4 from a site like ​http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/. It would be interesting to hear feedback on this option, as there is an opportunity to use versions using the Intel Math Kernel Library, which should provide a useful increase in speed.

Download ANUGA

So now to actually installing anuga. First we need to get the actual anuga source code.

Zipped version

A zipped version of the latest development version of anuga is available from github at ​https://github.com/stoiver/anuga_core/archive/master.zip and the latest released version at sourceforge ​http://sourceforge.net/projects/anuga/files/anuga_1.3/anuga_1.3.10.zip

Checkout anuga via svn

You can also check out the anuga repository using subversion. I suggest installing ​tortoise svn downloads and then checking out the following svn repository. When you installed tortoise svn it creates a few extra menu items to your right click menu in the file manager. Just choose "tortoise" checkout to download the code.

https://anuga.anu.edu.au/svn/anuga/trunk/anuga_core

This should produce an anuga_core directory

Installing ANUGA

Now go to the directory anuga_core and build and install anuga. Fire up a cmd terminal, change to the anuga_core directory and run

python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 install

Run Unit tests

From the anuga_core directory run the unit tests via:

python runtests.py

Note

At present the Anaconda (conda) version of gdal is missing the gdal data directory (presumably to save space). This will cause some error messages of the form "ERROR 4: Unable to open EPSG support file gcs.csv". It should be fine to disregard these errors messages. It would be possible to download the gdal data directory and point the GDAL_DATA environment variable to the data directory.

Conclusion

Hopefully all the unit tests pass. As this is bleeding edge there are sometimes a small number of failures as this is a work in progress. Have a look at the demos in the directory anuga_core/documentation/user_manual/demos (along with the user manual) to see how to use anuga.

Updating

From time to time you should update your version of anuga. This is fairly easy. Just choose the directory to "update" and then right click and choose "tortoise update" to update the code (if you checkout anuga using subversion).

Then again from the anuga_core directory recompile the code and check the unit tests via

python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 install
python runtests.py

Note

You can add a text file pydistutils.cfg to your C:\Users\Username directory contaning the configuration info

[build]
compiler=mingw32

so that the command

python setup.py install

will now build using the mingw32 compiler.