Lumerical: Mac OSX support, please
Lukas Chrostowski
Professor at UBC, ECE, Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute; Co-Founder at Dream Photonics Inc.
Dear Ansys / Lumerical,
Please bring back Mac OSX support for Lumerical tools.
Mac OSX computers are heavily used by photonic designers.
My research group uses Mac OSX for most day to day things including design work, data analysis; Linux for heavy simulations; and Windows for test and measurement equipment.
At photonics conferences, workshops, courses, and hack-a-thons, it is common to see between 20-40% of computers being a Mac.
Lumerical Solutions supported all three major platforms for the first decade – Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Then with the Ansys acquisition, OSX support was removed. The latest OSX release from 2021 is unfortunately incompatible with the new license server.
This necessitated that we kept the old license server so that everyone can keep using Lumerical tools, but it means that our software has not been updated in 2 years!
The photonics design ecosystem has numerous tools that support all three platforms, and a major consideration in which tool we use is based on availability for all platforms. Examples that provide for multi-platform support include: KLayout, GDSfactory, Tidy3D FlexCompute.
We also use quantum photonics tools. Lumerical offers Quantum INTERCONNECT, but there are OSX compatible tools out there: Xanadu Strawberry Fields, and Quandela's Parseval.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Lukas
p.s. if there are others out there who would also like OSX support, please leave a comment below.
March 2025 update: I have been running Lumerical on a virtual machine, and it is better than nothing. Here are the steps that worked for me (link).
CTO at Tech-X Corporation and Professor at University of Colorado Boulder
5 个月The GPU accelerated photonics tool, XSim, does have have MacOSX support. Help make it a success! It also has cloud support using the new CloudCompute system. https://txcorp.com/xsim/
Lukas makes a great point here. I know it costs time for Lumerical to add this support, but the customers appreciate the flexibility.
It would be wonderful to see Lumerical support Mac OS and make their suite for accessible.
Senior Photonics Design Engineer at Nokia
2 年Thanks for bringing this up Lukas. Agreed.
Associate Professor, Researcher, Principal Investigator, Photonics Expert/Consultant
2 年Agreed!