Extra requirements

We have some extra requirements that you don’t need to install to use TeNPy, but that you might find usefull to work with. TeNPy does not import the following libraries (at least not globally), but some functions might expect arguments behaving like objects from these libraries.

Note

If you created a [conda] environment with conda env create -f environment.yml, all the extra requirements below should already be installed :) (However, a pip install -r requirements.txt does not install them.)

Matplotlib

The first extra requirement is the [matplotlib] plotting library. Some functions expect a matplotlib.axes.Axes instance as argument to plot some data for visualization.

Intel’s Math Kernel Library (MKL)

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 [conda] 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

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.

HDF5 file format support

We support exporting data to files in the [HDF5] format through the python interface of the h5py <https://docs.h5py.org/en/stable/> package, see Saving to disk: input/output for more information. However, that requires the installation of the HDF5 library and h5py.

YAML parameter files

The tenpy.tools.params.Config class supports reading and writing YAML files, which requires the package pyyaml; pip install pyyaml.

Tests

To run the tests, you need to install pytest, which you can for example do with pip install pytest. For information how to run the tests, see Checking the installation.