First, download and install the MacOs executable (.dmg image) VisIt. (Please note that we recommend version 2.11: this has been used successfully with this plugin on High Sierra.)
After downloading/cloning the plugin source, we will use the xml2cmake tool located in
<Visit application directory>/Contents/Resources/bin/
where <Visit application directory>
would usually be /Applications/VisIt.app. You can either use this directly, or add an alias
in your ~/.profile.
To generate the CMakeLists.txt, run:
xml2cmake -public -clobber OpenPMD.xml
Note that you may need to prepend a path to a Python 2 interpreter for this step.
This step generates the file CMakeLists.txt in the source directory.
If your system uses cmake version >= 3 (you can check using cmake --version) then it is
necessary to add SET(CMAKE_MACOSX_RPATH 1) to the head of CMakeLists.txt.
Then, prepare the makefile by doing
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Debug
This step generates the files CMakeFiles/, CMakeCache.txt, and cmake_install.cmake.
To compile and generate the library, use:
make
with the optional flag -j N with N the number of threads to use to speed up compilation.
You have almost finished, make sure that the libraries have been successfully created in the plugins directory, usually
/Applications/VisIt.app/Contents/Resources/<VisIt version>/darwin-x86_64/plugins/databases/
You should be able to find the files: libEOpenPMDDatabase_ser.dylib, libMOpenPMDDatabase.dylib,
and libEOpenPMDDatabase_par.dylib.
Once you have installed the openPMD viewer, Visit will automatically recognize it.
To start Visit, you can use the launcher but we recommend to start Visit by command line:
/Applications/VisIt.app/Contents/MacOS/VisIt -np <number of cores>
You can specify the number of cores you want to use in parallel with VisIt. openPMD files are read and treated in parallel if more than one core are used.