Installation

BOSS is written in Python 3 and distributed as a PyPI package.

User-installation

If you are not using virtual enviroments, we recommend doing a user-installation with pip:

python3 -m pip install --user aalto-boss

On Linux, this will place the python module under $HOME/.local/lib/python3.X/site-packages where X should be substituted for the minor version of your Python distribution. During the installation an executable called boss, which is used to run BOSS, is built and placed under $HOME/.local/bin. In order for your BOSS installation to function properly, these paths must (if not already present) be appended to the correct enviroment variables:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin
# Do not forget to substitute X for your Python minor version
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$HOME/.local/lib/python3.X/site-packages

To check that the installation was successful, calling the boss executable without any arguments should result in usage instruction being printed. During the installation you may see a large number of dependencies being installed by pip. Notably, BOSS uses the Gaussian process framework GPy as a backend.

Development version

To install the development version, clone the source code and install with pip:

git clone https://gitlab.com/cest-group/boss.git
cd boss
python3 -m pip install --user .

Known issues

  • Rarely, on HPC systems, runtime errors related to the use of cython in GPy have been observed. This can typically be resolved by using a more fully-featured Python distribution that ships with cython, such as Anaconda.

  • BOSS is frequently run on HPC queues in parallel jobs that accommodate data acqusitions. Please be sure to set the system variable export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1 for optimal performance in serial jobs (for parallelisation in BOSS, check the keywords). On some systems, it may be needed to set:

export MKL_NUM_THREADS=1
export NUMEXPR_NUM_THREADS=1
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1