Software

Pyloidal is a small utility library which may be used to perform tokamak coordinate transformations. A wide range of coordinate conventions are used throughout the MCF plasma physics software ecosystem, so it is often necessary to convert the outputs from one software package to match the convention used by another. The conventions themselves are formalised and assigned a unique identifier by the tokamak COordinate COnventionS (COCOS). Pyloidal is capable of both converting from one COCOS convention to another, or determining which convention is currently in use. In cases where the convention is ambiguous, Pyloidal returns all possibilities.

nc-complex is a lightweight, drop-in extension for netCDF that handles reading and writing complex numbers. Currently there are C and C++ APIs, and it has been integrated into netcdf4-python. A Fortran API is also planned.

The FAIR Data Pipeline (FDP) is a collection of software utilities for tracking the provenance of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data. It was originally developed to aid in the creation of reproducible epidemiological modelling workflows, a need spurred by the outbreak of COVID-19. FDP allows users to automate a data processing pipeline that traces all inputs, outputs and associated metadata in a FAIR manner. APIs are available in Python, R, Julia, C++, and Java.

EPOCH is a particle-in-cell (PIC) code used to simulate laser-plasma interactions, with research applications including inertial confinement fusion, laser wakefield acceleration, and quantum electrodynamics. However, EPOCH is written in Fortran, which will make it difficult to optimise for next-generation HPC architectures which will rely heavily on GPU offloading. As a result, there is an effort underway to reimplement EPOCH in C++ using performance-portable frameworks.

Epoch is a particle-in-cell (PIC) code widely used within plasma physics, particularly in the regime of laser-plasma interactions. PIC codes aim to self-consistently solve Maxwell’s equations in the presence of a large number of charged particles, many of which travel at relativistic velocities. Epoch and similar codes are often used to provide insight into the physics of matter interacting with extremely intense radiation, such as the conditions observed in inertial-confinement fusion (ICF) experiments or many astrophysical phenomena.