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Installing ANTs release binaries

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Philip Cook edited this page Jul 15, 2022 · 8 revisions

This page refers to a new feature. Release binaries will be available from ANTs 2.4.1.

Supported platforms

Binaries are compiled on Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 22.04), Centos7 (using devtoolset7), and Mac OS (11 and 12). The builds use the default compiler for each platform.

The build is a default Superbuild. If you require custom build options (like VTK), you will need to build from source.

Installing binaries

First unzip the archive to your desired install prefix, then set the environment variables. The archives contain ants-{version}/[bin,lib]. To simplify the instructions, we'll omit the version numbering below and assume we have /opt/ants/[bin,lib].

Set environment variables PATH and ANTSPATH

Assuming your install prefix was /opt/ants, there will now be a binary directory /opt/ants/bin, containing the ANTs executables and scripts. The scripts additionally require ANTSPATH to point to the bin directory including a trailing slash.

The exact syntax may vary depending on your terminal shell. For the bash shell, you would set

export ANTSPATH=/opt/ants/bin/
export PATH=${ANTSPATH}:$PATH

Now check this worked correctly:

which antsRegistration

should print out the full path to antsRegistration, and

antsRegistrationSyN.sh

should print out the usage for that script. You can put the above variable definitions in your shell initialization file, so future sessions will have them set automatically. On a Mac, this is usually ~/.profile, on Linux ~/.bash_profile.

Set ITK_GLOBAL_DEFAULT_NUMBER_OF_THREADS to control multi-threading at run time

Many ANTs programs use multi-threading. By default, one "worker" will be generated for every CPU core on the system. This might be acceptable on a single-user machine but in a cluster environment, you will need to restrict the number of threads to be no more than the number of cores you have reserved for use.

Set the environment variable

ITK_GLOBAL_DEFAULT_NUMBER_OF_THREADS

to control the number of threads ANTs will use.

Mac OS: Override security settings

Mac OS will prevent downloaded binaries from executing unless those binaries are signed. ANTs binaries are not signed because this capability requires a paid Apple Developer subscription.

To run ANTs binaries, you will need to manually add them to the list of approved programs. This is most efficiently done in the terminal with

spctl --add /opt/ants/bin/*
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