Installation#

Sionna is composed of three Python modules, namely Sionna RT, Sionna PHY, and Sionna SYS.

Sionna PHY and Sionna SYS require Python 3.11+ and PyTorch 2.9+. We recommend Ubuntu 24.04. Earlier versions of PyTorch may still work but are not recommended. We refer to the PyTorch get-started guide for GPU (CUDA) support and the required driver setup.

Sionna RT has the same requirements as Mitsuba 3 and we refer to its installation guide for further information. To run Sionna RT on CPU, LLVM is required by Dr.Jit. Please check the installation instructions for the LLVM backend.

If you want to run the tutorial notebooks on your machine, you also need JupyterLab. You can alternatively test them on Google Colab. Although not necessary, we recommend running Sionna in a Docker container and/or Python virtual enviroment.

The Sionna Research Kit runs on the NVIDIA DGX Spark. We refer to the quickstart guide for a detailed introduction.

Using pip#

The recommended way to install Sionna is via pip:

pip install sionna

If you want to install only Sionna RT, run:

pip install sionna-rt

If you want to install Sionna without the RT package, run:

pip install sionna-no-rt

From source#

  1. Clone the repository with all submodules:

    git clone --recursive https://github.com/NVlabs/sionna

    If you have already cloned the repository but forgot to set the –recursive flag, you can correct this via:

    git submodule update --init --recursive --remote

  2. Install Sionna (including Sionna RT) by running the following command from within the repository’s root folder:

    pip install ext/sionna-rt/ .
pip install .

Testing#

First, you need to install the test requirements by executing the following command from the repository’s root directory:

pip install '.[test]'

The unit tests can then be executed by running pytest from within the test folder.

Documentation#

Install the requirements for building the documentation by running the following command from the repository’s root directory:

pip install '.[doc]'

You might need to install pandoc manually.

You can then build the documentation by executing make html from within the doc folder.

To serve the documentation locally:

make serve

This serves the documentation at http://localhost:8000/sionna/ with the same URL structure as the production website. You can specify a different port with make serve PORT=9000.

For local development without the /sionna/ prefix, build and serve with:

BASE_PATH= make html
BASE_PATH= make serve