The Pencil Code

The Pencil Code is a high-order finite-difference code for compressible hydrodynamic flows with magnetic fields and particles. It is highly modular and can easily be adapted to different types of problems. The code runs efficiently under MPI on massively parallel shared- or distributed-memory computers.

The Pencil Code moved to GitHub on 19 April 2015. It was previously hosted at Google Code.

In order to checkout the code with Subversion, use the command

svn checkout https://github.com/pencil-code/pencil-code/trunk pencil-code --username <github-username>

where <github-username> is your GitHub username.

To get started, run one of the samples:

unix>  cd pencil-code
unix>  source sourceme.csh  [or . sourceme.sh]
unix>  cd samples/conv-slab
unix>  mkdir data

To set up the symbolic links and compile the code:

unix>  pc_setupsrc
unix>  pc_build  [ -f /path/to/config/file.conf ]

To create the initial condition and run the code:

unix>  pc_start  [ -f /path/to/config/file.conf ]
unix>  pc_run    [ -f /path/to/config/file.conf ]

See pencil-code/config/hosts/*/*.conf for sample config files. For more details, see the manual in the doc/ directory (also available here).

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If you are using bash and you do not want to "source sourceme.sh" on each session, you can insert the following into your .bashrc and/or .bash_profile:

export PENCIL_HOME=$HOME/pencil-code  [or wherever you have the code]
_sourceme_quiet=1; . $PENCIL_HOME/sourceme.sh; unset _sourceme_quiet

If you are using csh insert the following into your .cshrc:

setenv PENCIL_HOME $HOME/pencil-code  [or wherever you have the code]
source $PENCIL_HOME/sourceme.csh

Documentation

• A new documentation webpage has been created with the goal of gather all the documentation together and create auto-documentation for the code: Pencil Code documentation.
• The manual is the main source of information.
• There is also a quick start to help getting started.
• Information about Python with the Pencil Code and the Python Coding Style can be found on the wiki.
• Updates to the community are provided through the newsletter.
• Talk to use during the Pencil Code Office Hours every second Friday of the month at 13:00 CET via zoom (641-599-5185). You may also want to inspect the activity of Pencil Code Steering Committee. Please contact them with your ideas.
• The Pencil Code User Meeting will be held every year. The 2022 meeting will be organized from India by Piyali Chatterjee online: Pencil Code User Meeting 2022.
• See the Scientific Usage of the Pencil Code for papers using or discussing the code.

List of Contributors

• Around 100 people have contributed to various extent during the nearly 20 years of Pencil Code history.
• The current list of contributors shows the temporal check-in activity of the those who stayed connected with the code over the various host changes (Nordita 2001-2007, Google Code 2007-2015, and Github since 2015). Some additional contributors are also listed in the manual.

How to contribute to the Pencil Code

• For all changes to the code, make sure the auto-test still runs

• If you have write access: check in your changes and make sure you can fix possible problems emerging on travis-ci.com as well as the minutely, hourly, and daily auto-tests.

• If you have only read access: fork this repository and use pull requests to contribute.

Code of Conduct

• The Pencil Code community adheres to the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. Please familiarize yourself with its details.

License

• The Pencil Code is under the GNU public license agreement.