Installation instructions

Installation from packages

If you have the conda package manager from anaconda, you can simply download the environment.yml file and create a new environment for tenpy with all the required packages:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate tenpy

This will also install pip. Alternatively, if you only have pip, install the required packages with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Note

Make sure that the pip you call corresponds to the python version you want to use. (e.g. by using python -m pip instead of a simple pip Also, you might need to use the arguement --user to install the packages to your home directory, if you don’t have sudo rights.

Warning

It might just be a temporary problem, but I found that the pip version of numpy is incompatible with the python distribution of anaconda. If you have installed the intelpython or anaconda distribution, use the conda packagemanager instead of pip for updating the packages whenever possible!

After that, you can install the latest *stable* TeNPy package (without downloading the source) from PyPi with:

pip install physics-tenpy # note the different package name - 'tenpy' was taken!

Note

When the installation fails, don’t give up yet. In the minimal version, tenpy requires only pure Python with somewhat up-to-date NumPy and SciPy. See the section Installation from source below.

To get the latest development version from the github master branch, you can use:

pip install git+git://github.com/tenpy/tenpy.git

Finally, if you downloaded the source and want to modify parts of the source, you should install tenpy in development version with -e:

cd $HOME/TeNPy # after downloading the source
pip install --editable .

In all cases, you can uninstall tenpy with:

pip uninstall physics-tenpy  # note the longer name!

Updating to a new version

Before you update, take a look at the CHANGELOG, which lists the changes, fixes, and new stuff. Most importantly, it has a section on backwards incompatible changes (i.e., changes which may break your existing code) along with information how to fix it. Of course, we try to avoid introducing such incompatible changes, but sometimes, there’s no way around them.

How to update depends a little bit on the way you installed TeNPy. Of course, you have always the option to just remove the tenpy files and download the newest version, following the instructions above.

Alternatively, if you used git clone ... to download the repository, you can update to the newest version using Git. First, briefly check that you didn’t change anything you need to keep with git status. Then, do a git pull to download (and possibly merge) the newest commit from the repository.

Note

If some Cython file (ending in .pyx) got renamed/removed (e.g., when updating from v0.3.0 to v0.4.0), you first need to remove the corresponding binary files. You can do so with the command bash cleanup.sh.

Furthermore, whenever one of the cython files (ending in .pyx) changed, you need to re-compile it. To do that, simply call the command bash ./compile again. If you are unsure whether a cython file changed, compiling again doesn’t hurt.

To summarize, you need to execute the following bash commands in the repository:

# 0) make a backup of the whole folder
git status   # check the output whether you modified some files
git pull
bash ./cleanup.sh  # (confirm with 'y')
bash ./compile.sh

Installation from source

Minimal Requirements

This code works with a minimal requirement of pure Python>=3.5 and somewhat recent versions of NumPy and SciPy.

Getting the source

The following instructions are for (some kind of) Linux, and tested on Ubuntu. However, the code itself should work on other operating systems as well (in particular MacOS and Windows).

The offical repository is at https://github.com/tenpy/tenpy.git. To get the latest version of the code, you can clone it with Git using the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/tenpy/tenpy.git $HOME/TeNPy
cd $HOME/TeNPy

Adjust $HOME/TeNPy to the path wherever you want to save the library.

Optionally, if you don’t want to contribute, you can checkout the latest stable release:

git tag   # this prints the available version tags
git checkout v0.3.0  # or whatever is the lastest stable version

Note

In case you don’t have Git, you can download the repository as a ZIP archive. You can find it under releases, or the latest development version.

Minimal installation: Including tenpy into PYTHONPATH

The python source is in the directory tenpy/ of the repository. This folder tenpy/ should be placed in (one of the folders of) the environment variable PYTHONPATH. On Linux, you can simply do this with the following line in the terminal:

export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/TeNPy

(If you have already a path in this variable, separate the paths with a colon :.) However, if you enter this in the terminal, it will only be temporary for the terminal session where you entered it. To make it permanently, you can add the above line to the file $HOME/.bashrc. You might need to restart the terminal session or need to relogin to force a reload of the ~/.bashrc.

Whenever the path is set, you should be able to use the library from within python:

>>> import tenpy
/home/username/TeNPy/tenpy/tools/optimization.py:276: UserWarning: Couldn't load compiled cython code. Code will run a bit slower.
  warnings.warn("Couldn't load compiled cython code. Code will run a bit slower.")
>>> tenpy.show_config()
tenpy 0.4.0.dev0+7706003 (not compiled),
git revision 77060034a9fa64d2c7c16b4211e130cf5b6f5272 using
python 3.7.3 (default, Mar 27 2019, 22:11:17)
[GCC 7.3.0]
numpy 1.16.3, scipy 1.2.1

tenpy.show_config() prints the current version of the used TeNPy library as well as the versions of the used python, numpy and scipy libraries, which might be different on your computer. It is a good idea to save this data (given as string in tenpy.version.version_summary along with your data to allow to reproduce your results exactly.

If you got a similar output as above: congratulations! You can now run the codes :)

MKL and further packages

If you want to run larger simulations, we recommend the use of Intel’s MKL. It ships with a Lapack library, and uses optimization for Intel CPUs. Moreover, it uses parallelization of the LAPACK/BLAS routines, which makes execution much faster. As of now, the library itself supports no other way of parallelization.

If you don’t have a python version which is built against MKL, we recommend using the anaconda distribution, which ships with Intel MKL, or directly intelpython. Conda has the advantage that it allows to use different environments for different projects. Both are available for Linux, Mac and Windows; note that you don’t even need administrator rights to install it on linux. Simply follow the (straight-forward) instructions of the web page for the installation. After a successfull installation, if you run python interactively, the first output line should state the python version and contain Anaconda or Intel Corporation, respectively.

If you have a working conda package manager, you can install the numpy build against mkl with:

conda install mkl numpy scipy

If you prefer using a separete conda environment, you can also use the following code to install all the recommended packages:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate tenpy

Note

MKL uses different threads to parallelize various BLAS and LAPACK routines. If you run the code on a cluster, make sure that you specify the number of used cores/threads correctly. By default, MKL uses all the available CPUs, which might be in stark contrast than what you required from the cluster. The easiest way to set the used threads is using the environment variable MKL_NUM_THREADS (or OMP_NUM_THREADS). For a dynamic change of the used threads, you might want to look at process.

Some code uses MatPlotLib for plotting, e.g., to visualize a lattice. However, having matplotlib is not necessary for running any of the algorithms: tenpy does not import matplotlib by default. Further optional requirements are listed in the requirements*.txt files in the source repository.

Compilation of np_conserved

At the heart of the TeNPy library is the module tenpy.linalg.np_conseved, which provides an Array class to exploit the conservation of abelian charges. The data model of python is not ideal for the required book-keeping, thus we have implemented the same np_conserved module in Cython. This allows to compile (and thereby optimize) the corresponding python module, thereby speeding up the execution of the code. While this might give a significant speed-up for code with small matrix dimensions, don’t expect the same speed-up in cases where most of the CPU-time is already spent in matrix multiplications (i.e. if the bond dimension of your MPS is huge).

To compile the code, you first need to install Cython

conda install cython                    # when using anaconda, or
pip install --upgrade Cython            # when using pip

Moreover, you need a C++ compiler. For example, on Ubuntu you can install sudo apt-get install build_essential, or on Windows you can download MS Visual Studio 2015. If you use anaconda, you can also use one conda install -c conda-forge cxx-compiler.

After that, go to the root directory of TeNPy ($HOME/TeNPy) and simply run

bash ./compile.sh

Note that it is not required to separately download (and install) Intel MKL: the compilation just obtains the includes from numpy. In other words, if your current numpy version uses MKL (as the one provided by anaconda), the compiled TeNPy code will also use it.

After a successful compilation, the warning that TeNPy was not compiled should go away:

>>> import tenpy
>>> tenpy.show_config()
tenpy 0.4.0.dev0+b60bad3 (compiled from git rev. b60bad3243b7e54f549f4f7c1f074dc55bb54ba3),
git revision b60bad3243b7e54f549f4f7c1f074dc55bb54ba3 using
python 3.7.3 (default, Mar 27 2019, 22:11:17)
[GCC 7.3.0]
numpy 1.16.3, scipy 1.2.1

Note

For further optimization options, look at tenpy.tools.optimization.

Checking the installation

As a first check of the installation you can try to run (one of) the python files in the examples/ subfolder; hopefully all of them should run without error.

You can also run the automated testsuite with pytest (pip install pytest) to make sure everything works fine:

cd $HOME/TeNPy/tests
pytest

This should run some tests. In case of errors or failures it gives a detailed traceback and possibly some output of the test. At least the stable releases should run these tests without any failures.

If you can run the examples but not the tests, check whether pytest actually uses the correct python version.

The test suite is also run automatically with travis-ci, results can be inspected at here.