hypnotoad 0.1.3

Grid generator for BOUT++

Dependencies

• options module ('pip3 install --user options')
• yaml module ('pip3 install --user PyYAML')
• scipy (recent enough version, tested with 1.3.0 'pip3 install --user --upgrade scipy')

Installation

From PyPi

The simplest way to get hypnotoad is by simply running

$ pip install --user hypnotoad

git repo

If you need to modify the hypnotoad code, or get development versions, clone from github

$ git clone [e-mail]:boutproject/hypnotoad.git

You can install from the git repo with pip, this is useful to get the executables added to your path. Make sure to do an 'editable' install using -e or --editable option like

$ cd hypnotoad
$ pip install -e .

This installs executables which use the code that's currently in the git repo, so if you edit or update it you will see the updates. If you install with pip install . (without the -e) then pip can get confused because it can't tell which version number is newer, as the git repo versions have a version number based on the git hash, not a simple x.y.z; then pip may for example not uninstall hypnotoad correctly.

Usage

Options are read and set up in the Equilibrium (child-)class object, and passed from there to the Mesh (child-)class object.

User-settable options, with their current values, are printed when an Equilibrium object is created. Internal options should not need to be set by the user, but can be overridden with keyword arguments to the Equilibrium constructor.

Hypnotoad can be run either as an executable, which just reads from an input file, or interactively from a Python shell. To ensure reproducibility, it is suggested to create your final grid non-interactively. The interactive mode is intended to make it easier to prototype the grid and find a good set of input parameters. Once you have found a configuration you are happy with, you can save the current input parameters with Equilibrium.saveOptions(filename='hypnotoad_options.yaml'); this may be especially useful if you have changed some options from the Python shell with keyword-arguments.

Grid generation can take a while with the default options, which are set for high accuracy. When prototyping, it is suggested to temporarily use lower accuracy. The following may be a good starting point:

• finecontour_Nfine=100. This speeds up the creation of the internal, high-resolution, fixed-spacing representation of contours, and also calculations of distance along contours and some interpolation functions.
• gradPsiRtol=2.e-6 and gradPsiAtol=1.e-6. These control the maximum error on the integration along grad(psi) used to trace grid lines orthogonal to the flux surfaces. They do not usually make a huge difference, but affect the time spent in 'Following perpendicular'.
• If your wall is given by a large number of points (say more than 20) it might be worth creating a simpler one with fewer points for prototyping. This will speed up the 'finding wall intersections' stage. Note that the wall only matters where it intersects the grid.
• Decreasing the resolution of the grid will also help. The grid points will probably not be in exactly the same place, but the algorithms are intended to produce grid spacings that are inversely proportional to the total number of points, so the structure should be very similar.