Installation notes

Installation on Unix systems

MTUQ installation is possible on Unix and Unix-like systems.

Installation on MacOS systems

MTUQ installation is possible on MacOS systems.

Installation on Apple Silicon Macs

MTUQ installation on Apple M1, M2, and M3 Macs is now possible using the default installation procedure. A modified conda environment file is no longer necessary.

Installation on Windows

MTUQ installation is not currently supported on Windows. We invite users to contribute portability fixes.

A common cause of installation errors on Unix systems

On Unix systems, a non-writeable /tmp directory can cause the installation to fail in unexpected ways. Such issues appear to originate from NumPy or conda, rather than MTUQ directly.

Since NumPy and conda appear to respect the TMPDIR environment variable, a useful check can be to set TMPDIR to a directory that exists and is writeable.

NumPy compatibility warnings

Following the NumPy v2.0.0 release, “numpy.ndarray size changed” and other warnings have been widely reported.

For the time being, we have specified numpy<2 for the default installation.

Accelerating bottlenecks

MTUQ now uses numba.jit for a significant speedup. The older C and Cython extension modules have been deprecated.

Speeding up conda installs

Older versions of the conda package manager can be very slow. For a potential speedup, conda can be updated as follows:

conda update -n base conda

For reference, the largest potential speed up comes from the new mamba dependency solver, which was adopted in the 23.10 release.