Support for Pycapsid Installation on PowerPC Architecture (ppc64le)

[abelardoacm]

Triton Supercomputer

• Operating System: CentOS 7.6
• Architecture: PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le)
• Default Shell: Bash
• Data Transfer: SCP and SFTP

Description

We are attempting to install Pycapsid on the University of Miami's Triton High Performance Computing (HPC) system, which utilizes the PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le) architecture. During the installation process, we encountered difficulties as some dependencies, notably Biotite, are not available for this architecture.

The unavailability of these dependencies prevents the successful deployment of Pycapsid in our environment.

Expected Behavior

Ideally, Pycapsid and all its dependencies should be installable on various common architectures including ppc64le, allowing users on different systems to utilize the software without architecture-related barriers.

Actual Behavior

Currently, the installation fails due to the lack of available builds for ppc64le architecture for some of the required dependencies, such as Biotite.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Attempt to install Pycapsid on a system with ppc64le architecture using Conda:
2. Observe the failure in resolving the environment due to unavailable packages.

Possible Solution

1. Build and host the necessary dependencies, like Biotite, for ppc64le architecture on Conda or another manageable package manager.
2. Provide alternative installation instructions that allow manual compilation or installation from source for systems with this architecture.
3. Think about ways to make PyCapsid independent of Biotite (if only a few biotite functions are currently used).