1. Requirements and Installation

CAPE tries not to have its own system requirements. The idea is that any hardware that can run Cart3D (or FUN3D or OVERFLOW) can also run this software. The full package is only supported on Linux, though support for portions of the capabilities can be used on any machine that supports CPython 2.7 or 3.6+.

Installation is simple and done directly from a Python “wheel” file:

Python 3.6+:

(recommended)

$ python3 -m pip install cape-1.0-cp38-cp38-linux_x86_64.whl
Python 2.7:
$ python2.7 -m pip install cape-1.0-cp27-cp27mu-linux_x86_64.whl

This package (including its C Python extensions) is supports either Python 2.7 or 3.6+ using the same source code. Some of the newer capabilities of Python 3 are therefore absent from the code base. Support for Python 2.7 will be dropped with the next release.

Note

On a system on which you the user do not have elevated privileges, you may need to insert --user between install and cape.

Note

This requires installing pip, which is not universally installed with the default CPython installation. Usually one of the following commands will install it as long as Python itself is already installed on its system.

$ easy_install --user pip
$ easy_install-2.7 --user pip
$ easy_install-3.6 --user pip

Note

The pip install command can still be executed on a system that doesn’t directly match the specifications of the .whl file, but the C accelerator extension will not be installed in such a case.

Note

On Windows systems, the recommended pip install command is slightly different:

$ py -m pip install cape-1.0-none-any.whl

1.1. Software Dependencies

The following software is required to execute any of the pyCart functions.

  • Python version 2.7 or 3.6+

  • NumPy version 1.4.1 or newer

  • Matplotlib version 2.0 or newer

Installation using the above pip commands will install or update these packages if necessary.

1.2. Optional Software Dependencies

There are several more pieces of software that are required for some of the advanced features of Cape.

  • Some version of PDFLaTeX (type pdflatex into a shell to test)

    Note

    There are various distributions of PDFLaTeX; the most common Linux distribution is texlive, which is usually installed on high- performance computing systems.

  • SciPy

  • Vendorize

For visualizing flow solutions in these automated reports, Tecplot® is required, although ParaView support is also possible.

Finally, the IPython interactive shell is recommended for advanced users and users of the API.