Languages

 FORTRAN77/90/95 - is the main programming language used to code EMPIRE core (physics modules) and utility codes. GNU compiler gfortran-4.5 or later, available for free with all Linux systems, set the reference. EMPIRE runs also with commercial Intel's ifort, while earlier versions were tested with Lahey/Fujitsu-6.2.

 bash - shell scripting language used on Linux and Mac by a number of scripts.

 Python - shell scripting language used in a number of scripts and essential to the operation of the system.

 Tcl/Tk & Itcl - are used to code GUI's. Recent Mac OS X versions provide native Tcl/Tk and Itcl that allow to run Empire GUI.

 C - is used in the ZVView package. All FORTRAN compilers mentioned above incorporate C.

 gawk - is of marginal importance; needed only to create plots directly from the EMPIRE output, which is a seldom used optiion.

Platforms

Full 'out of box' functionality of EMPIRE can be expected on LINUX and Mac OS X. General UNIX might require some adjustments but complete (or nearly complete) EMPIRE system can be built. The MS Windows system is currently not fully supported, although full EMPIRE calculations can be run in the terminal using scripts in the empire/scripts directory.

  LINUX

Linux has been native environment of EMPIRE and all recent releases were developed on subsequent versions of Red Hat. The current 3.2 version has been running under Red Hat Enterprise 5.x and Ubuntu 10.04 but Red Hat 7.3, 8, and 9 and Fedora were used for development of previous versions. Other LINUX distributions should also be fine.

Mac OS X

EMPIRE-3.2 is fully functional on Intel based Macs running OS X Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, (High) Sierra and Mojave. Usage of the EMPIRE scripts requires Xcode's 'line commands' which unfortunately implies that Xcode itself has to be installed. OS X Lion and Mountain Lion contain the 8.4 version of Tcl/Tk that works. OS X Mavericks default is 8.5, which is not fully compatible with the EMPIRE GUI but 8.4 is also included and might be used instead of 8.5. OS X Ysemite, El Capitan and (High) Sierra work out of the box, but Mojave (10.14.1) comes with a broken implementation of Tcl/Tk (no icons and text on the GUI buttons). Until Apple fixes this problem the EMPIRE provided Tcl/Tk-8.4 should be used (see README in empire/Tcl directory).

  UNIX

UNIX operating systems were not tested but are expected to be adequate without any (or with minor) adaptations. One should only ensure that bash, Python, FORTRAN compiler and Tcl/Tk along with Itcl are installed.

   MS Windows

TO BE FIXED! Individual FORTRAN modules (in particular the physics core) can be compiled and executed under MS Windows. The Windows version of gfortran provides a bash shell. Using this from the command line will allow the automatic execution of the sequence of EMPIRE modules. One may also try to use cygwin which provides bash shell but we haven't tested this route. We are gradually migrating all bash scripts to Python to build the GUI operated Windows version.