Installing Ocean Tools

Ocean software is supported on the following operating systems:

  • Linux
  • Windows (tested on 64-bit Windows 8, 10)
  • Mac (tested on mac OS X 10.13)

Ocean software requires a Python environment. Supported Python versions are:

  • 2.7.x
  • 3.5 and higher

Attention

D-Wave’s Ocean software will stop supporting Python 2 at the end of 2019.

For information on why many in the Python development community are requiring Python 3, see the Python 3 statement.

This section explains how to install Ocean software, either the entire suite of tools or particular tools from the D-Wave GitHub repositories listed under Tools.

Most Ocean tools require that you configure a solver on your system, which might be a D-Wave system or a classical sampler that runs on your local CPU.

Python Virtual Environment

It’s recommended that you work in a virtual environment on your local machine; depending on your operating system, you may need to first install Python and/or virtualenv.

  1. Download Python describes how to install Python on your local machine for supported operating system.

    For Unix-based systems, which often have Python pre-installed, installation might be as simple as:

    sudo apt-get install python<version>

    Attention

    For Windows systems, note that only 64-bit Python is supported.

  2. Install virtualenv describes how to install the virtualenv tool for creating isolated Python environments on your local machine for supported operating system.

    For Unix-based systems, installing virtualenv is typically done with a command such as this or similar:

    sudo pip install virtualenv

  3. Create a virtual environment for your Ocean work. For example, on Unix systems you might do:

    virtualenv ocean
source ocean/bin/activate

    (On Windows operating system, activating a virtual environment might be done with the Scripts\activate command instead.)

Your machine is now ready to install Ocean software.

Install Ocean Software

The simplest way to start is to install dwave-ocean-sdk for the full suite of Ocean tools.

  • You can pip install the SDK inside your newly created virtual environment, typically with a command such as this or similar:

    pip install dwave-ocean-sdk

  • Alternatively, you can clone dwave-ocean-sdk repo and install the SDK to your virtual environment; for example:

    git clone https://github.com/dwavesystems/dwave-ocean-sdk.git
cd dwave-ocean-sdk
python setup.py install

Note: To install a particular tool within the SDK only, follow the link to the GitHub repository for the tool, as listed under Tools, and follow the installation instructions on the README file.

Configure a Solver

Most Ocean tools solve problems on a solver, which is a compute resources such as a D-Wave system or CPU, and might require that you configure a default solver.