Installation

First, we need to make this tool available on your machine:

Windows
Linux
macOS

Note

The electrostatic landscape solver, PoisSolver, is currently only available on Ubuntu. It is unavailable on other platforms for various reasons:

Windows pre-compiled binaries: PoisSolver’s dependent package, FENiCS, does not offer native Windows support. Use Windows Subsystem for Linux instead.
macOS: Currently untested.

If you are just getting started with SiQAD, there is still much to explore in SimAnneal and HoppingDynamics to get you started. However, advanced designs involving clocking electrodes will certainly require the use of PoisSolver.

Windows

Pre-compiled Binaries

Pre-compiled binaries are available for Windows 10. They can be downloaded on the official SiQAD GitHub releases page with both x86 (32-bit) and x86-64 (64-bit) builds available. For now, the binaries are packaged in portable form; installer support will be added in the future.

See the note at the top of the page regarding the lack of PoisSolver support in the pre-compiled binaries as well as possible remedies.

Some of the bundled simulators require a Python interpreter (official download page). Supported versions include Python 3.5 to 3.8. Python 3.7 acquired from Windows Store doesn’t seem to work for us, but 3.8 seems to work. For now, we recommend sticking with acquiring Python from the official website.

Additional packages that are needed by Python-based plugins are acquired automatically through pip and installed into virtual environments via venv such that they do not interfere with system Python packages. Both pip and venv come with a standard Python installation.

Windows Subsystem for Linux

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) enables the execution of Linux binaries within Windows provided that you have an up-to-date copy of Windows 10. You may refer to the official guide from Microsoft for enabling WSL. We recommend the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS image, but Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is also supported.

You will also need an X11 server to display graphical applications. We have tested Xming and it works, but other alternatives out there should also be functional.

After setting up WSL, you may refer to the Linux section for either downloading SiQAD from the PPA or compiling the binaries from source within the WSL environment.

Linux

A Ubuntu PPA is available containing the latest stable version. If you prefer compiling from source or using a development version, you would have to build from source.

Ubuntu PPA

This applies to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Add the SiQAD PPA to Ubuntu and install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:siqad/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install siqad

You may then invoke SiQAD from the terminal:

siqad

Future updates will add appropriate desktop icons.

Building from Source

Prerequisites

This tutorial works on both Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Install the following prerequisites:

# general dependencies
sudo apt install python3-pip python3-tk python3-venv make gcc g++ qtchooser qt5-default libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libqt5charts5 libqt5charts5-dev libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-random-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config cmake git
# poissolver dependencies
sudo apt install python3-dolfin gmsh

On non-Debian systems, packages equivalent to the ones listed above will be needed.

Additional packages that are needed by Python-based plugins are acquired automatically through pip and installed into virtual environments via venv such that they do not interfere with system Python packages. They are provided by the listed prerequisites python3-pip and python3-venv.

Scripted Compilation

To quickly test out the tool without installing SiQAD into your system, you may use the quick compilation script with the following instructions.

Clone the repository (including submodules) onto your local machine:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/siqad/siqad.git

Run the make_everything_dev script from the project root:

chmod +x make_everything_dev
./make_everything_dev release notest

(When debugging, change the release argument to debug. When developing, exclude notest.)

If the make_everything_dev script returns with errors, please jump to the Step-by-step Cmake Compilation section and try again. If compilation is successful, you should be able to invoke the binary by running:

./build/release/siqad

from the project root. If you’ve compiled using the debug flag, then the binary is located at ./build/debug/siqad instead.

If you would like to be able to invoke SiQAD from anywhere in your system when you’re logged in, make a symbolic link from one of the directories in $PATH to the SiQAD binary. For example, if the binary exists in ~/git/siqad/build/release/siqad and if ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH, you may create a symbolic link by:

ln -s ~/git/siqad/build/release/siqad ~/.local/bin/siqad

After this, you will be able to invoke SiQAD simply by running siqad as your logged in user.

Step-by-step CMake Compilation

Clone the repository (including submodules) onto your local machine:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/siqad/siqad.git

In the project root, create a build directory and run cmake:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./siqad -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

Set -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to your preferred installation path. If it is not set, the default prefix will be set to /opt/siqad.

If CMake finishes successfully, compile and install:

make
make install

For multi-threaded compilation, add the -j N flag to make where N is the number of cores you want to use. make install copies the appropriate files to the path set in CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX in the cmake command of the previous step, and may require sudo privileges depending on the prefix that you’ve chosen.

To invoke SiQAD, enter the full path to the binary (e.g. /opt/siqad/siqad if CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX was set to /opt/siqad). If you would like to simply invoke SiQAD without having to enter the full path, some of the options include:

Adding the installation prefix to your $PATH;
Making a symbolic link from one of directories in $PATH to the binary. For example, ln -s /opt/siqad/siqad "${HOME}/.local/bin/siqad" if CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX was set to /opt/siqad.

macOS

We do not have an official compilation guide for macOS yet. However, we have had success compiling SiQAD on macOS in the past, albeit haphazardly. We recommend following the Step-by-step CMake Compilation tutorial for Linux and adapt/debug along the way.