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2.2. Download an executable for macOS

LAMMPS can be downloaded, built, and configured for macOS with Homebrew. (Alternatively, see the installation instructions for downloading an executable via Conda.) The following LAMMPS packages are unavailable at this time because of additional requirements not yet met: GPU, KOKKOS, MSCG, POEMS, VORONOI.

After installing Homebrew, you can install LAMMPS on your system with the following commands:

brew install lammps

This will install the executables “lammps_serial” and “lammps_mpi”, as well as the LAMMPS “doc”, “potentials”, “tools”, “bench”, and “examples” directories.

Once LAMMPS is installed, you can test the installation with the Lennard-Jones benchmark file:

brew test lammps -v

The LAMMPS binary is built with the KIM package, which results in Homebrew also installing the kim-api binaries when LAMMPS is installed. In order to use potentials from openkim.org, you can install the openkim-models package

brew install openkim-models

If you have problems with the installation, you can post issues to this link.

Thanks to Derek Thomas (derekt at cello.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp) for setting up the Homebrew capability.