Installation

plasmacoll needs Python 3.10 or newer. It depends on NumPy and cunumpy, which selects NumPy or CuPy as the array backend.

pip install plasmacoll

For development, clone the repository and install it in editable mode:

git clone https://github.com/max-models/plasmacoll
cd plasmacoll
pip install -e ".[dev]"

or with uv:

make install    # uv sync --extra dev, plus the pre-commit hooks

GPU

On a machine with CuPy installed, select the CuPy backend before the first array is created:

CUNUMPY_BACKEND=cupy python my_simulation.py

or cunumpy.set_backend("cupy") at the start of the program. plasmacoll then creates its arrays and random numbers on the GPU. The test suite also runs on cunumpy’s host-memory stand-in for CuPy, so the CuPy code paths are checked without a GPU:

make test-cupy  # CUNUMPY_FAKE_CUPY=1 CUNUMPY_BACKEND=cupy pytest

Optional extras

Extra	Installs
test	pytest and pytest-cov
docs	the notebook runner, matplotlib and griffe for the API reference
dev	ruff, pyright, ty and pre-commit, plus the test and docs extras