Welcome to trimem’s documentation

Trimem is a python package for the Monte Carlo simulation of lipid membranes according to the Helfrich theory [Helfrich1973].

Installation

Trimem can be installed via

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/bio-phys/trimem.git
pip install trimem/

We suggest the installation using the --user flag to pip. Alternatively, we recommend to consider the usage of virtual environments to isolate the installation of trimem, see, e.g., here.

Dependencies

Trimem builds upon the generic mesh data structure OpenMesh, which is included as a submodule that is pulled in upon git clone via the --recurse-submodules flag, see Installation.

For the efficient utilization of shared-memory parallelism, trimem makes use of the OpenMP application programming model (>= v4.5) and modern C++. It thus requires relatively up-to-date compilers (supporting at least C++17).

If not already available, the following python dependencies will be automatically installed:

  • numpy

  • scipy

  • h5py

  • meshio

Documentation and tests further require:

  • autograd

  • trimesh

  • sphinx

  • sphinx-copybutton

  • sphinxcontrib-programoutput

Usage

Trimem provides a convenient user interface via a Command line interface that is available after Installation as mc_app under the respective binary installation directory available to pip. For a quick-start and more detailed documentation, please have a look at the User manual.

Alternatively, trimem can also be used as a python library. High level functionality is exposed in the module trimem.mc.util. For details on low level functionality, please refer to the API reference.

Citation

If you use trimem for your scientific work, please consider the citation of [Siggel2022].

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