LayerCake

“Welcome to the layer cake son.”

-- Michael Gambon - Layer Cake (2004)

General Information

LayerCake is a framework to design models based on systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), and convert them to ordinary differential equations (ODEs) via Galerkin-type expansions.

LayerCake allows you to construct systems of PDEs, and to specify coordinate systems and basis functions to build the corresponding ODE systems. To build these systems, LayerCake relies heavily on the Sympy symbolic computation framework. The output of this procedure is either a Numbaified Python callable, or a list of symbolic ODE tendencies that can be integrated in any of the supported languages (Fortran, Julia and Python for the moment). These two kinds of output allow for the study of the computed models with the modern tools available in all these languages.

LayerCake has been designed with geophysics in mind, although it may be useful for other applications.

About

(c) 2025-2026 Jonathan Demaeyer and Oisín Hamilton

See LICENSE.txt for license information.

Installation

With pip

The easiest way to install and run LayerCake is to use pip. Type in a terminal

pip install layercake-model

and you are set!

Additionally, you can clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Climdyn/LayerCake.git

and perform a test by running the script

python LayerCake/examples/atmospheric/barotropic_one_layer.py

to see if everything runs smoothly (this should take less than 5 minutes).

With Anaconda

The second-easiest way to install and run LayerCake is to use an appropriate environment created through Anaconda.

First install Anaconda and clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jodemaey/LayerCake.git

Then install and activate the Python3 Anaconda environment:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate layercake

You can then perform a test by running the script

python examples/atmospheric/barotropic_one_layer.py

to see if everything runs smoothly (this should take less than 5 minutes to run).

Documentation

To build the documentation, please run (with the conda environment activated):

cd documentation
make html

You may need to install make if it is not already present on your system. Once built, the documentation is available here.

The documentation is also available online at https://climdyn.github.io/LayerCake/. In particular, please consider reading the User guide.

Examples

A few examples are available in the examples folder. More examples will be provided as the code is further developed.

Dependencies

LayerCake needs mainly:

• Numpy for numeric support
• sparse for sparse multidimensional arrays support
• Numba for code acceleration
• Sympy for symbolic computations

Check the YAML file environment.yml for the dependencies.

Contributing

LayerCake is in beta development phase, bug reports and tests of the features are welcome. Please simply raise an issue on Github.

If you want to contribute actively to the development, please contact the main authors. In addition, if you have made changes that you think will be useful to others, please feel free to suggest these as a pull request on the LayerCake Github repository.