[chimerax-users] Apple silicon (M1 chip) native version?

[Alexis Rohou]

Hi Tom, ChimeraX team,

What is the status of ChimeraX on Apple M1/Silicon machines? Does it work?
Well? Natively?

Cheers,
Alexis

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 11:11 AM Jeffrey D. Hartgerink <jdh at rice.edu> wrote:

> Hi Tom,
>
> Thank you for this detailed response! It illustrated the challenges well
> and was very useful. In particular, I was unaware of the all-or-nothing
> nature of Rosetta.
>
> I’ve recently acquired an arm based Mac mini and would be happy to test
> any early builds if that would be useful.
>
> -Jeff
>
> --------------------------------------
> Jeffrey D. Hartgerink, Ph.D.
> Prof. of Chemistry and Bioengineering
> Rice University, MS 602
> 6100 Main Street
> Houston, TX 77005
> jdh at rice.edu / 713-348-4142
> hartgerink.rice.edu
>
> On Mar 22, 2021, at 12:58 PM, Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> One more detail.  Our lab is getting an Apple Silicon machine so we can
> attempt to make a native ChimeraX version.
>
> Tom
>
>
> On Mar 22, 2021, at 10:57 AM, Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> In the future we would like to provide a native Apple Silicon (ARM CPU)
> version of ChimeraX.  We have not tried it yet.  It would be easy to
> compile the C++ code we develop for the new CPU.  But the trouble is that
> ChimeraX depends on over 50 third party Python modules, some of them
> including compiled code.  I believe all of those compiled python modules
> will have to be available compiled for ARM in order for us to make a native
> ChimeraX app.  According to Apple's developer documentation you cannot mix
> ARM compiled code with Intel compiled dynamically loaded modules in the
> same process:
>
> From
> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/about-the-rosetta-translation-environment
> Important
> The system prevents you from mixing arm64 code and x86_64 code in the
> same process. Rosetta translation applies to an entire process, including
> all code modules that the process loads dynamically.
>
>
> Major packages we use like the Qt window toolkit and numpy array module
> provide native ARM versions.  But less well maintained modules like the
> PyOpenGL-accelerate module ChimeraX uses for OpenGL graphics has not been
> updated for more than a year (Jan 2020) and there is no telling when an ARM
> version will become available.
>
> The following GitHub repository (focused on neuroimaging) describes some
> of the availability problems from scientific packages on ARM CPUs.
>
> https://github.com/neurolabusc/AppleSiliconForNeuroimaging
>
>   Tom
>
>
> On Mar 21, 2021, at 7:40 PM, Jeffrey D. Hartgerink <jdh at rice.edu> wrote:
>
> Are there any plans for an Apple Silicon (M1 chip) native version of
> ChimeraX? While things work ok via the Rosetta emulator, it would be great
> to have the performance from a native app.
>
> --------------------------------------
> Jeffrey D. Hartgerink, Ph.D.
> Prof. of Chemistry and Bioengineering
> Rice University, MS 602
> 6100 Main Street
> Houston, TX 77005
> jdh at rice.edu / 713-348-4142
> hartgerink.rice.edu
>
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