METIS Installation on google colab

Question

Following this source I would like to install METIS and the Python wrapper in colab: https://github.com/james77777778/metis_python

The installation steps are listed as the following:

1. Download and extract metis-5.1.0.tar.gz from METIS - Serial Graph Partitioning and Fill-reducing Matrix Ordering
2. cd metis-5.1.0
3. make config shared=1 prefix=~/.local/
4. make install
5. export METIS_DLL=~/.local/lib/libmetis.so
6. pip3 install metis-python

However, I'm not sure how to do steps 2-4 in colab specifically and so I get the following error: RuntimeError: Could not locate METIS dll. Please set the METIS_DLL environment variable to its full path.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The issue seems to be the location of the libmetis.so file. Copying the file to /usr/lib and updating the path for the environmental variable successfully completes the process:

import requests
import tarfile

# Download and extract the file
url = "http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/fetch/sw/metis/metis-5.1.0.tar.gz"
response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
file = tarfile.open(fileobj=response.raw, mode="r|gz")
file.extractall(path=".")

# Change working directory
%cd metis-5.1.0

# The remaining steps as you have shown in the question, with updated path
!make config shared=1 prefix=~/.local/
!make install
!cp ~/.local/lib/libmetis.so /usr/lib/libmetis.so
!export METIS_DLL=/usr/lib/libmetis.so
!pip3 install metis-python

import metispy as metis