Apple Silicon Compatibility Question

[AndrewFalkowski]

I am in the process of spec'ing a mac for running moose simulations. I am wondering if there are any compatibility issues or caveats with apple silicon (M1) chips that I should understand or be aware of? My simulations are not particularly taxing - primarily 1D coupled diffusion processes. Thanks in advance!

[milljm]

I believe this PR may detail the caveats: #20349. For which the results of this PR can be found here: https://civet.inl.gov/job/1017127/

For the most part, Apple Silicon is working, for solving finite element problems using MOOSE. Some of the more 'pretty' features are not at the moment. Such as using the MOOSE GUI; Peacock. Peacock requires Qt. Qt at the moment is not officially supported on ARM (ref: https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-on-apple-silicon). And therefore not available in Conda-Forge.

[milljm]

If you do wish to use the packages currently available for ARM, they are available so long as you install one of the ARM variants of Miniforge/Mambaforge (we recommend Mambaforge). Just swap out our current 'Getting Started' instructions with a link to an ARM Mambaforge, and that should be all you need to do.

[AndrewFalkowski]

Gotcha, any advice in terms of minimum RAM or processor requirements?

[GiudGiud]

For 1D simulations you should be good with the base amount of memory

[milljm]

As for processors... concerning the folks within my group; we always go with the most cores possibly available. Not necessarily speed, but core count. As for the Apple Silicon, because there is really only one or two options, this point is moot. M1, M1Pro, M1Max... But I think the Max is more a GPU core count upgrade than CPU one.

Anyone want to chime in? I could be wrong.

[GiudGiud]

Yeah no need to spend more on GPU so far. MOOSE GPU support is increasing but not there yet.
Again for 1D simulations I think you dont need too much on CPU either, base option should do